AMC's app went dark for two hours two days before Resident Evil opens. The chain hasn't said why
AMC’s app stopped working at half past three on Wednesday afternoon, Eastern time. Within half an hour Downdetector was logging 820 complaints a quarter-hour, 86% of them about the app specifically. The chain has said nothing, and Resident Evil opens in two days.
Reports started at 3:33 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. Fifteen minutes before that, Downdetector was logging one complaint about AMC Theatres. At 3:33 it logged 476. At 4:03 p.m. it logged 820 in a single quarter-hour, which is the peak so far.
The breakdown is the interesting part. Of everyone who filed a report, 86% picked "App". Login accounted for 6%, the website for 5%. This was not the whole of AMC falling over — it was the thing most people now use to buy a ticket.
By 4:48 p.m. the count was down to 367 and still falling. AMC has not posted anything about it, and no outlet has a statement from the chain. The only news coverage as of writing is a service piece in the Asbury Park Press telling readers the app is down.
Why a Wednesday afternoon is the wrong afternoon
Resident Evil opens Friday. Boxoffice Pro's forecast, published the same day, puts it at $40M–$50M domestically on 24% of every showtime in the country — the largest share of any title on the board. The outage landed in the middle of the two days before that.
What nobody can say yet is whether the two things are connected. Downdetector counts user reports, not causes. A ticketing app can fall over from demand, from a bad deploy, from a payment processor, or from something entirely unrelated to what is on screen that week.
The largest cinema chain in the world spent two hours with its main ticketing surface broken, and has so far explained none of it.
The honest summary: a two-hour outage on the app, immediately before a weekend the exhibition business is watching closely, with no explanation attached to it.
Read more: Resident Evil is heading for $40-50M, and the film to compare it to isn’t a Resident Evil movie
If you were mid-purchase
- Tickets you already bought still exist. The confirmation email is the record, independent of whether the app will open.
- Do not re-buy through a half-loading screen. The most common way an outage costs money is the same seat bought twice.
- Nobody reported problems inside cinemas. The reports are split across app, login and website only — there is nothing in them about box offices or scanners.
- The curve is already coming down — 820 at the peak, 367 forty-five minutes later.
None of that is a statement from AMC, because there isn't one. If the chain explains itself, it will most likely be after the fact and in a sentence, which is how these end.
Four in five people who bothered to report it named the app, not the website. That is the whole story in one number.
Friday still comes. The question the numbers raise is a smaller and more boring one than the headlines about the movie: how much of an opening weekend a cinema chain can afford to run through one app.
Earlier we wrote: Grey’s Anatomy character deaths in order: the full list reads like Shonda Rhimes’ personal hit list — McDreamy included
