Disneyland Fanatics Are Foaming at the Mouth for the Park to Reopen

After closing last March due to the coronavirus pandemic, Disneyland is planning to re-open on April 30th. And that means, unsurprisingly, the adults who are way too obsessed with all things Disney (and I suppose, some parents of actual children) were ready to pounce when the Disney Parks started selling advance tickets on Thursday. So ready to pounce, in fact, that the demand overwhelmed the website and led to a site outage for some guests attempting to buy tickets or make reservations for the park.

Guests attempting to get tickets on disneyparks.com were met with a message reading:

“Thank you for your continued patience! Due to high demand, this is taking longer than expected. We have a lot of Guests accessing our system, so you are now in a waiting room to plan your park visit.”

Although the approximate wait time currently says “more than an hour,” a note posted at 4:14 pm PST on Thursday says that wait times could actually be “several hours or more.”

Though it is much more socially acceptable to spend hours online waiting in a queue now that many people are sitting at home in front of their computers all day, it is still more than mildly absurd to spend hours online waiting in a queue for tickets to a theme park. Sure, it’s been closed for the past year—and it’s clear that the Disneyland fans have suffered—but once the park reopens it will be open every day from 9 am to 7 pm. This isn’t a limited edition shoe drop, there is no such thing as a shortage of Disney!

Although Orlando’s Walt Disney World has been open in some capacity since July of 2020, the harsher coronavirus restrictions in California have kept Disneyland closed for the entirety of the pandemic—which is probably for the best, considering some of the wild antics of guests (and the questionable safety procedures of the park itself).