Demand for The Beak and Barrel Too Much for Disney’s Servers

Written by Joshua Posted August 14th, 2025

Update: Beak and Barrel reservations will not be made available today, August 14, 2025. Read the latest.

Disney’s servers were unable to handle the surge of people trying to book The Beak and Barrel reservations this morning. Shortly before 6 AM Eastern, users began encountering error screens. Disney chose to blame Hei Hei for the outage:

“It might be Hei Hei’s Fault that we’re having a system issue at this time. We’ll have it fixed soon, though, so please try again later.”

Disney Dining error screen blaming Hei Hei for the outage

Eventually, those error screens gave way to the following message: “We’re Down for Maintenance! But we’ll be up and running soon, so please try again later.”

Disney World website maintenance screen features Dante

At this point, Disney guests have been unable to make dining reservations for roughly three hours. Disney’s phone lines have also been flooded, with wait times exceeding 2 hours before Disney paused reservations there, as well. Those wanting to wait can call (407) 939-5277.

It’s time for Disney to roll out virtual queues when high-demand reservations go live. They’ve proven to be effective during vacation package releases, keeping servers from collapsing under the rush. And while we’re at it, let’s put some villains on those error screens. Dante and Hei Hei don’t deserve to be thrown under the bus.

We’ll update this post once the issues are resolved, hopefully with news that we snagged a table at The Beak and Barrel.