Walt Disney World is built to handle a lot. Heat waves. Torrential rain. Even hurricanes with advanced warning. What it isn’t built for—at least not often—is sustained, historic cold. And that reality is becoming impossible to ignore as a rare Central Florida freeze continues to push park operations to their limits.
What started as weather advisories and reduced hours has quietly turned into something more serious. Across the resort, attractions are going down, shows are being canceled, and guests are being forced to constantly rethink their plans as the cold settles in. This isn’t just about water rides or outdoor experiences anymore. The strain is now visible inside the parks themselves.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom has felt the impact most sharply. On what is supposed to be DINOSAUR’s final day of operation, the attraction has struggled to stay open, going down for extended periods. For fans hoping to say goodbye one last time, the timing couldn’t be worse. Instead of a smooth final run, the attraction’s farewell has been interrupted by weather-driven downtime that underscores just how fragile operations can become in extreme conditions.
Nearby, Avatar Flight of Passage and Expedition Everest have also experienced closures. These are two of the park’s biggest crowd absorbers, and when both are unavailable—even temporarily—the ripple effects are immediate. Wait times balloon elsewhere. Guests crowd into limited indoor spaces. The park’s overall rhythm breaks down.
Even entertainment offerings haven’t been spared. Festival of the Lion King canceled its 11 a.m. performance, despite being an indoor show. While that might seem surprising on the surface, large-scale productions rely on complex backstage systems, staffing logistics, and safety checks that don’t exist in a vacuum. When weather pushes the entire operation into defensive mode, even indoor shows can fall victim.
Magic Kingdom hasn’t escaped the freeze either. The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure has been down, removing a key indoor attraction that often serves as a refuge during weather disruptions. The Magic Carpets of Aladdin has also experienced downtime, further thinning an already strained attraction lineup.
That’s before factoring in Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which remains closed. While that closure was already known, its absence looms larger now as more rides go offline. Several other attractions have experienced intermittent downtime as well, creating a sense of unpredictability that guests feel almost immediately. Plans made in the morning don’t always hold by afternoon.
Over at EPCOT, Journey Into Imagination with Figment has been temporarily closed at the time of this writing. The attraction is often seen as a dependable fallback during bad weather, so its closure adds another layer of frustration for guests searching for consistency.
What makes this situation particularly difficult is how widespread it is. This isn’t one park dealing with weather-related hiccups. All four theme parks are feeling the effects in different ways, and that’s changing the overall guest experience. When multiple headliners and family rides go down at once, the parks start to feel smaller, tighter, and far less flexible.
Disney hasn’t framed the situation as a shutdown, but the growing list of unavailable attractions tells its own story. The resort is operating under real strain, prioritizing safety and system protection over capacity. That’s the right call, but it doesn’t make the experience any easier for guests who didn’t pack for single-digit wind chills.
As temperatures slowly rebound, attractions will return—some quickly, others more cautiously. For now, this historic freeze has exposed just how vulnerable even Walt Disney World can be when nature pushes beyond the norm.
They also closed Be Our Guest this evening for undisclosed reasons. We had to make alternative plans when they told us they were shut down and didn’t expect to reopen today when we showed up for our dinner reservation. The haunted mansion ride stopped three times throughout the event, a pipe had burst from one water fountain (and wouldn’t turn off at another, creating a big puddle), but who knows if that was outage related. I also have a beautiful photo of one of the fountains with icicles hanging off the side.