A power outage at Universal Studios Florida on Saturday, July 18 stopped Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon mid-operation, leaving 70 guests stranded on board while the Orlando Fire Department was called in to assist with the evacuation.
No one was injured. But the evacuation involved harnesses, safety ropes, and ladders, and at least some of the guests on board spent approximately two hours inside the stopped attraction before getting out.
The incident is worth understanding in detail, both for what it reveals about how ride evacuations actually work and for what it means for anyone with a Universal Studios Florida trip planned in the near future.
The Timeline From Inside the Ride
Shayden Leite was on Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon when the power went out. Her account of what the experience felt like from inside gives the clearest picture of how the situation unfolded for guests.
The ride “jerked suddenly,” she told WESH 2 News, which was the first indication something had gone wrong. What followed was a period of repetitive on-board messaging that did not evolve with the situation. “It didn't feel like things were being communicated in a well manner, it was just the same thing over and over again, like, ‘Hey, we're gonna get it fixed ASAP,'” she said. “Eventually it was, ‘Oh, the ride may continue at any moment,' and then it turned into, ‘OK, we're just gonna get you guys out of there.'”
That progression tells you something about how these situations develop in real time. The initial assumption is that the problem will be resolved quickly. When it becomes clear it will not, the messaging shifts. By the time an evacuation is announced, guests have already been sitting in a stopped attraction long enough to understand that the original reassurances were not accurate predictions.
The Orlando Fire Department confirmed the details to WESH 2 News: 70 people on board, all in an upright position, in an air-conditioned space when the outage occurred. No medical issues reported, no complaints filed.
A TikTok video posted by @stephbuffamonte captured the evacuation itself. The caption explains what viewers are seeing: “Orlando firefighters used harnesses, safety ropes, and ladders to help stranded riders get off the Jimmy Fallon ride at Universal Studios on Saturday. Universal said the attraction was stopped due to a power outage at the resort.”
@stephbuffamonte Orlando firefighters used harnesses, safety ropes, and ladders to help stranded riders get off the Jimmy Fallon ride at Universal Studios on Saturday. Universal said the attraction was stopped due to a power outage at the resort. #orlando #florida #universalstudios
One rider added a comment on the video that fills in the compensation detail: “I was in the ride they gave me 250$ gift card and free express it was like 2 hours we was stuck up there.”
Two hours. Harnesses. A $250 gift card and Express Pass on the way out. That is the shape of what Saturday looked like for the guests involved.
Why Harnesses and Ladders Were Necessary
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon is a motion simulator experience housed inside a theater building themed to 30 Rockefeller Center, the home of NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It is not an outdoor roller coaster with platform access at ground level. It is an enclosed, elevated system inside a large indoor space.
When the normal egress systems for an attraction like this are not functioning because of a power outage, guests cannot simply step off and walk out. The positions guests are in require professional extraction equipment to exit safely. That is why the Orlando Fire Department's response included harnesses, safety ropes, and ladders rather than a cast member walking people off through a side door.
Understanding the format of the attraction is what makes the evacuation footage make sense. This was not an overreaction to a minor inconvenience. It was the appropriate response to 70 people in elevated enclosed positions with no operational power to bring them down through standard means.
What Universal Said and What Comes Next
Universal confirmed that the cause of the stoppage was a power outage at the resort. That explanation was provided to outlets covering the incident, including WESH 2 News and through the TikTok video caption.
What Universal has not provided is a timeline for when Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon will reopen. At the time of this report, the attraction's status following the Saturday evacuation was not confirmed. Guests planning to visit Universal Studios Florida who had specifically planned around this attraction should check the park app or official website before their visit rather than assuming the ride is operational.
The compensation provided to at least some guests, the $250 gift card and complimentary Express Pass described in the comment, reflects the scale of the disruption. A two-hour wait followed by a harness-assisted evacuation is significantly outside what guests reasonably expect from a theme park visit, and Universal's response in at least that case appears to have acknowledged that.
What This Means for a Central Florida Theme Park Trip
Universal Studios Florida and Walt Disney World are frequently part of the same Orlando vacation. Guests who split their trip between the two parks or who are deciding how to allocate their days are making choices that Saturday's incident is relevant to.
Ride closures and operational disruptions happen at every major theme park. Walt Disney World, Universal, SeaWorld, all of them have incidents that pull attractions offline unexpectedly. Saturday's evacuation at Universal is a more dramatic version of that reality, involving firefighters and harnesses rather than a routine mechanical pause, but the underlying lesson applies across all of them: building flexibility into a park day schedule is not pessimism. It is practical.
For any attraction that is a must-do on a given day, checking operational status before leaving the hotel and having a backup plan for the afternoon are the two habits that keep an unexpected closure from derailing an entire trip.
If you were at Universal Studios Florida on Saturday and either witnessed or experienced the evacuation, share what it looked like in the comments. And if you have a trip planned to Universal in the next few weeks and want to know whether Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon is back up, drop your question below and we will share whatever current information is available.
