MDE Down all morning 4/12/17

[Bandini]

You could only check your FP at a FP kiosk. Or maybe GS, I never got to GS in person in park.

The attraction CMs couldn't check.

So how did this work? If the app was down but you knew you had a FP for a particular ride at a particular time, but the ride CM's couldn't confirm. Were they turning people away?

 

[21stamps]

Just because it's the first you've heard of it, that doesn't mean it's the first one. Something similar happened not too long ago.

That's rides down, correct?

 

[xdan0920]

So how did this work? If the app was down but you knew you had a FP for a particular ride at a particular time, but the ride CM's couldn't confirm. Were they turning people away?

They could confirm, the Mickey still lit up green. But they couldn't access your account to check to see what other FP you had.

 

[ford91exploder]

Speaking of hubris - do you know of any other company that schedules downtime or maintenance on their reservation systems during business hours?

Nope - downtime during business hours usually means panic calls to vendors by angry CxO's

 

[21stamps]

They could confirm, the Mickey still lit up green. But they couldn't access your account to check to see what other FP you had.

Ok, so that's what I've been trying to decipher from this. If you knew when your FP was.. then you could still go to that attraction and scan your band?

 

[Bandini]

Earlier, someone mentioned when the airline computers crashed and all of the flights were cancelled. I think I would be safe in guessing that the airlines have implemented stop gap measures to prevent this from recurring. Whereas, Disney seems to ignore their crashes. It's Groundhog day every time a new offer is announced.

 

[Laketravis]

Other companies learn from their mistakes and implement tooling, automation, and redundancy to help reduce the pain of outages. Netflix created their own CDN, when they had the big Amazon outage it was not a total outage for Netflix because the traffic and content is distributed.

Many companies anycast their public DNS terminating traffic at multiple points of presence, so a consumer never actually sees when a site goes down.

Disney's public / consumer facing systems quite often do not meet even basic capacity requirements. How often you see stitch eat the page or MDE not work properly? Often.

Downtime does mean a bad system, every time. It may be acceptable downtime, but it's still bad even when it's planned because it impacts customers and that is never good.

MDE and their reservation/ticketing/dining websites are all served by the same service bus, the same databases, and more than likely the same front end load balancers. The only difference is more than likely that MDE traffic passes to their API servers, and their website traffic passes to their reverse proxies and content servers.

Whoa. I'm guessing you know how this stuff works?

 

[RustySpork]

Whoa. I'm guessing you know how this stuff works?

That's a reasonable assumption.

 

[Laketravis]

Earlier, someone mentioned when the airline computers crashed and all of the flights were cancelled. I think I would be safe in guessing that the airlines have implemented stop gap measures to prevent this from recurring. Whereas, Disney seems to ignore their crashes. It's Groundhog day every time a new offer is announced.

Exactly. Stuff breaks. The companies that care about their systems (and to a great extent, their customers) do a postmortem and fix it. The ones that don't just bring it back up, pat themselves on the back for restoring it, and wait for it to crash again.

 

[PuertoRekinSam]

Disney has the ABSOLUTE WORST website availability of any company I have ever seen large or small.

Magically pathetic

The ABSOLUTE WORST? Have you tried using Sea World's?

 

[RustySpork]

The ABSOLUTE WORST? Have you tried using Sea World's?

We're talking availability, not design.

 

[Laketravis]

The ABSOLUTE WORST? Have you tried using Sea World's?

LOL! I have, and you're right. But I don't have to make ride and dining reservations on their site. I don't have much love for Universal's, either. It always seems slow and clunky. But again, my need for it is minimal.

 

[RustySpork]

LOL! I have, and you're right. But I don't have to make ride and dining reservations on their site. I don't have much love for Universal's, either. It always seems slow and clunky. But again, my need for it is minimal.

I'm not liking Universal's redesign. The site itself is fine, but I needed a password reset the other day and it told me I had to make a new account and that the old one isn't recoverable due to an upgrade. LOLWUT?

They probably deprecated an old hashing method, but rather than expiring and forcing a new password they just killed the accounts. Not cool.

 

[PuertoRekinSam]

LOL! I have, and you're right. But I don't have to make ride and dining reservations on their site. I don't have much love for Universal's, either. It always seems slow and clunky. But again, my need for it is minimal.

Yeah I just wanted to connect my AP to the app. After 3 days of back and forth, they just completely deleted my account and had me reset it. Which dumped out my 2017 dining plan... still trying to get that on my account.

 

[Casper Gutman]

OK, I risk revealing my stupidity here, but...

The thing that has always confused me about FP+ is that it seems to essentially allow people to wait in four lines at once (three virtual, one physical). If everyone is using the system to its fullest extent, wouldn't this essentially quadruple the number of people in line in each of the parks - and thus slow down the experience enormously for everyone? Unless my logic is completely off, this seems like a pretty big flaw at the conceptual level.

 

[PuertoRekinSam]

You wait in 3 lines virtually and buy stuff at the same time.

It's like using amazon while in the standby line... but in reverse.

 

[ford91exploder]

OK, I risk revealing my stupidity here, but...

The thing that has always confused me about FP+ is that it seems to essentially allow people to wait in four lines at once (three virtual, one physical). If everyone is using the system to its fullest extent, wouldn't this essentially quadruple the number of people in line in each of the parks - and thus slow down the experience enormously for everyone? Unless my logic is completely off, this seems like a pretty big flaw at the conceptual level.

The goal of both the paper and electronic FP systems was to get people into the shops and restaurants between FP attractions, Which was promptly broken when the food and beverage people reduced restaurant capacity AND the shops began to all carry the SAME merchandise.

 

[Casper Gutman]

The goal of both the paper and electronic FP systems was to get people into the shops and restaurants between FP attractions, Which was promptly broken when the food and beverage people reduced restaurant capacity AND the shops began to all carry the SAME merchandise.

Oh, I understand the goal. If they wanted FP+ work as they intended, they needed to make all the parks over in the image of Diagon Alley or Carsland - lots of highly detailed shops and restaurants integrated into the land's narrative that offer unique, relevant merchandise and food. It's telling that WDW can't even spend the money for infrastructure to complete their cash grab.

I was just wondering if it's fair to think of FP+ as quadrupling (if everyone used it) the number of folks in line.

 

[ford91exploder]

Oh, I understand the goal. If they wanted FP+ work as they intended, they needed to make all the parks over in the image of Diagon Alley or Carsland - lots of highly detailed shops and restaurants integrated into the land's narrative that offer unique, relevant merchandise and food. It's telling that WDW can't even spend the money for infrastructure to complete their cash grab.

I was just wondering if it's fair to think of FP+ as quadrupling (if everyone used it) the number of folks in line.

The problem is that WDW is managed as a bunch of COMPETING business units all occupying the same physical plant, So each group is going to do what's best for their margin whether or not it's good for WDW's OVERALL profit margin. Rewards structure is built around cost savings and margin improvement, Disney is letting dining dollars walk out of the park due to a combination of high prices and limited availability. Merchandise is largely unappealing these days and there is little compelling to buy, Yes Disney has eliminated 'SKU creep' but they have also limited sales possibilities as well.

I was at a model train show a few weeks ago and saw a model monorail system from the 1960's and early 1970's amazing detail and quality and it was only sold at DL and a few premier hobby shops. Even at 45 years old it STILL ran beautifully on it's realistic beamway. This is the kind of stuff Disney has eliminated over the years.

It's actually kind of bizzare actually since supposedly Disney wants the upper 5% percentile of income distribution yet their merchandise is targeted at the lower 50% of the income distribution (but with the upper 5% pricing)

 

[larryz]

The problem is that WDW is managed as a bunch of COMPETING business units all occupying the same physical plant, So each group is going to do what's best for their margin whether or not it's good for WDW's OVERALL profit margin. Rewards structure is built around cost savings and margin improvement, Disney is letting dining dollars walk out of the park due to a combination of high prices and limited availability. Merchandise is largely unappealing these days and there is little compelling to buy, Yes Disney has eliminated 'SKU creep' but they have also limited sales possibilities as well.

I was at a model train show a few weeks ago and saw a model monorail system from the 1960's and early 1970's amazing detail and quality and it was only sold at DL and a few premier hobby shops. Even at 45 years old it STILL ran beautifully on it's realistic beamway. This is the kind of stuff Disney has eliminated over the years.

It's actually kind of bizzare actually since supposedly Disney wants the upper 5% percentile of income distribution yet their merchandise is targeted at the lower 50% of the income distribution (but with the upper 5% pricing)

Maybe "rich people don't buy souvenirs."