WDW / DCL / MDE Websites down AGAIN? (Jul 2 2016)

[englanddg]

I went to go look up itineraries for DCL, and compare that to something I'm looking at with Royal Carribean.

Color me surprised when I found that the Seven Dwarves joined the party!

I waited for about 10 minutes, but nope, same thing. I then tried to log into my account and it just timed out...

So, I went over to the WDW site. Clicked on "reserve a MYW package"...and...Hi Donald!

Hrm, well, lets try logging into MDE then?

Well, it let me log in and accept the updated TOS....but then I started at this for a few mins...

And then back to Donald!

I guess Disney is really getting top notch work from those H1B "programmers" they hired. Keep it up Disney!

(sigh...fix your stuff Disney!)

 

[DisneyJoe]

"Magical Enhancements" supposedly.

While I am also not a fan of H1B, I find that the fault usually lies with management/project leads/system architects that don't have the proper procedures and methodology in place, i.e. automated testing suite, regression tests, simple backup and failover systems, proper performance & load testing/tuning... you get the idea. Much goes back to the level of commitment to proper systems.

 

[LAKid53]

Yeah, I got many "sorry, but our system is so bad, all our websites are down" error messages for every Disney site this morning. Today is the first day I can check-in online for our cruise at the end of September. Site initially showed our reservations (we have two cruises booked). Managed to make it all the way through check-in and then, boom!, "sorry we cannot provide reservation detail at this time". Clicked on the link to order some new cruise merchandise, added items to my cart, went to sign in to check out, and boom! got the message "sorry our site is down, we are updating it" message. Are you kidding me?! You have a fantastic sale going on right now and it ends tomorrow.

At least you get graphics when Disney's sites crash....

But sheesh, ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME?

Can you imagine the outcry if Amazon crashed? On a holiday weekend? On Amazon Prime Day? If Amazon can do it with the volume of their traffic, surely Disney can.

 

[englanddg]

"Magical Enhancements" supposedly.

While I am also not a fan of H1B, I find that the fault usually lies with management/project leads/system architects that don't have the proper procedures and methodology in place, i.e. automated testing suite, regression tests, simple backup and failover systems, proper performance & load testing/tuning... you get the idea. Much goes back to the level of commitment to proper systems.

It's all of the above...and Disney, whilst they've gotten much better over the years, has never excelled in this regard...

The sad thing is, with MM+, you'd think they'd have doubled down on their commitment...but, it appears they have not.

Quite frustrating.

 

[gsimpson]

While I heartily agree that it is is management's fault, there is a very common issue with many, if not most, of the consultancies that run the replace your workers with low cost imports businesses. They promise the moon are know once they get the contract signed and get handed some critical projects it is very hard to get rid of them. It is purely a race to the bottom of cost and that always turns out well. Personally I hope Disney gets burned hard by their short sighted 'to heck with the employees' attitude. With any luck at all their will be some major data breaches caused by poorly designed and inadequately tested software that will cost them a few hundred million in liability, then we'll see if they can keep patting themselves on the back for how much money they saved by trampling on their old IT workers.

 

[Disney4family]

I also couldn't get on the DVC site this morning. It said the saved username and password were incorrect and I had 2 more tries before I was locked out. I called to speak with a CM. She said it wasn't me. The problem was on their side and they were aware of it. Nobody could get on. She didn't know how long it would take, but said I could try later on today to see if I could finally get on.

 

[englanddg]

Yeah, I got many "sorry, but our system is so bad, all our websites are down" error messages for every Disney site this morning. Today is the first day I can check-in online for our cruise at the end of September. Site initially showed our reservations (we have two cruises booked). Managed to make it all the way through check-in and then, boom!, "sorry we cannot provide reservation detail at this time". Clicked on the link to order some new cruise merchandise, added items to my cart, went to sign in to check out, and boom! got the message "sorry our site is down, we are updating it" message. Are you kidding me?! You have a fantastic sale going on right now and it ends tomorrow.

At least you get graphics when Disney's sites crash....

But sheesh, ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME?

Can you imagine the outcry if Amazon crashed? On a holiday weekend? On Amazon Prime Day? If Amazon can do it with the volume of their traffic, surely Disney can.

The graphics are easy to handle at a higher presentation layer than the stuff they are having trouble with (which seems more in the data/application layers)...

But, it's not new, and certainly shouldn't be going on this far into the implementations of their systems.

Sites go down (Youtube had a major east coast outage a few weeks ago, nearly 12 hours sporadic), but for Disney, I get the general impression this happens more often than not (either that or I am very unlucky...)

This is either a design issue, or their systems are poorly managed. Or a combination of both.