Skull Island: Reign of Kong Is in Its 17th Day of Closure, and themeparks.wiki Froze Its Record the Same Second as Jurassic Park River Adventure

Skull Island: Reign of Kong has not run a normal operating day at Universal's Islands of Adventure since Wednesday, August 26. It was still closed on Saturday morning, which makes today the seventeenth day, and there is no announced reopening date.

Thrill Data's archive of its posted wait times fills in the timeline. On August 26 the attraction posted a full day, thirteen hourly readings running from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., peaking at 10 minutes and averaging 7. Then it stops. That hourly history holds no readings at all for August 27, 28, 29 or 30. On Monday, August 31 a single 5 minute wait appears in the 7 p.m. column and nothing else that day. From September 1 through today there is nothing.

The attraction entrance in Universal's own publicity photography, shot at dusk with the torches lit and guests heading in past the rock marquee and the stacked skulls. Image: Universal Orlando Resort.

For scale, the same history shows Kong running day averages between 6 and 32 minutes across the two weeks before it went down, with a 69 minute peak at 11 a.m. on August 21. Across that stretch the history carries a reading for every single day, which is what makes the gap after August 26 stand out.

Two live feeds still called it closed on Saturday morning

Checked directly this morning, the themeparks.wiki live endpoint for Islands of Adventure returned Skull Island: Reign of Kong with a status of CLOSED. Queue-Times, which republishes the wait times the park publishes itself, returned the ride with is_open set to false at 13:26 UTC. The same themeparks.wiki snapshot had the park around it posting live waits: Jurassic World VelociCoaster at 20 minutes, The Incredible Hulk Coaster at 10 and Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at 70.

So the ride is not merely absent from a chart. Both trackers had it shut while the park around it was open and running, and Queue-Times states that the figures it shows are the ones the park publishes itself.

The detail worth pausing on: its stamp stopped moving

Every attraction in the themeparks.wiki feed carries a lastUpdated stamp. At 13:28 UTC on Saturday, every ride that was actually operating had refreshed within the previous ninety minutes. Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls, which was down at that moment, carried a stamp from 12:56 the same morning, so an attraction that breaks during the day still gets checked.

Kong's stamp read 2026-09-10T00:55:51.728Z. Jurassic Park River Adventure's read 2026-09-10T00:55:51.720Z. Eight milliseconds apart, and by Saturday morning both were about two and a half days stale.

Jurassic Park River Adventure is in an announced major refurbishment and is scheduled to reopen on November 20, 2026. Whatever moved that ride out of the feed's active polling at 00:55 UTC on September 10 moved Kong out within the same eight milliseconds.

The Kong animated figure as Universal photographs it, with riders in the open sided expedition truck looking up at his face. Universal has not said what is wrong with the attraction. Image: Universal Orlando Resort.

One fairness note on that signal. A frozen stamp is not proof of anything on its own: Camp Jurassic, the Jurassic Park Discovery Center, If I Ran The Zoo and Me Ship, The Olive all sat at an April 20 stamp in the same feed, and a Hogsmeade show, Hogwarts Always, had not been restamped since September 5. The feed does not say why any of them stopped refreshing. What is notable here is the pairing, on the same second, with the one Islands of Adventure ride that is in a publicly dated months long closure. Queue-Times, meanwhile, was restamping Kong's record about every five minutes on Saturday morning and still had it closed, so the frozen stamp is a themeparks.wiki artifact and not evidence that the park has dropped the ride from its own systems.

It is not on Inside Universal's refurbishment list

Inside Universal publishes a weekly roundup of what is happening across the Universal parks. The edition covering the week of September 7 lists three Universal Orlando refurbishments and only three: Jurassic Park River Adventure, scheduled to reopen November 20, 2026; the Horror Make-Up Show, closed May 12, 2026 for a reimagining and due back in Winter 2026; and Finnegan's Bar & Grill, closed for a major refurbishment and also due back in Winter 2026. Kong is not mentioned anywhere in the article.

People who follow the resort closely have been pointing at a different list, Universal's own, since September 8. On the Inside Universal forums that day, one poster wrote that the ride is "also still not listed on the 'temporary closures' section of Universal's website, which is pretty lame." On September 10, Alicia Stella, who covers the resort for Orlando ParkStop, wrote: "It should be listed on temporary closures. They know it's not opening today, two weeks later, and it's still not listed as closed. I get it's unplanned, but that doesn't mean they're unaware."

On September 11 another poster in the same thread said the closure had "generally flown pretty under the radar so far" and offered a reason: "The ride has simply been removed from the wait time boards altogether."

In fairness, that same poster opened with a warning worth carrying into this story: "There's a danger of 2+2=5 here" and went on to argue that a run of unrelated breakdowns should not be stitched into a pattern just because one genuinely long closure is running in the background. That applies to the timestamp pairing above as much as to anything else here.

Those are forum posts, not a Universal statement, and we could not read Universal's temporary closures page directly to confirm what is on it. What we can confirm is that the closure is real, that it is now in its seventeenth day, and that we could not find any outlet reporting a reopening date.

No cause has been confirmed

Universal has not said why the ride is down. Explanations are circulating among enthusiasts, including damage to the Kong animated figure, but none of them traces to Universal or to any outlet that has verified it, so we are not going to repeat them as fact. What is on the record is the length of the closure and the absence of a date.

What the park looked like on Saturday morning

Kong is not the only gap in that half of the park. On Saturday morning Jurassic Park River Adventure was closed for its announced refurbishment, Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges was closed, and Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls was showing as down. Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey was also down at 13:23 UTC. Of those four, only Jurassic Park River Adventure shared Kong's stalled stamp: the other three carried stamps from the same day, which is what a current outage looks like in this feed. By 14:36 UTC all three were posting waits again. Kong was still closed.

The temple gate at dusk in Universal's publicity photography, with an expedition truck on the roadway below it. Image: Universal Orlando Resort.

For anyone who has never ridden it

Skull Island: Reign of Kong opened in 2016. Universal's own Discover Universal blog notes that it "created a first for Universal with a ride vehicle that operates on a completely trackless system," and that there are "887 skulls throughout the attraction." Kong himself is described there as "a Megaprimatus, an ancient species of giant ape standing approximately three stories tall." The minimum height to ride is 36 inches.

If you have a trip booked in the next few weeks and Kong was on the list, plan around it for now and check the day you arrive. Seventeen days without a normal operating day and without a date is long enough that it is worth not counting on.

Sources

• themeparks.wiki, Universal Islands of Adventure live data (fetched September 12, 2026, 13:28 UTC)
• Queue-Times, Islands Of Adventure At Universal Orlando live queue times (fetched September 12, 2026, 13:26 UTC)
• Queue-Times, About page (where the site states its figures are the ones the parks publish)
• Thrill Data, Skull Island: Reign of Kong wait times and history
• Inside Universal, What's Happening at the Universal Parks, Week of September 7, 2026
• Inside Universal Forums, Skull Island: Reign of Kong General Discussion
• Discover Universal, Complete Guide to Skull Island: Reign of Kong at Universal Islands of Adventure
• Orlando ParkStop, Alicia Stella author page (the outlet she writes for)
• Universal Orlando Resort media site, Skull Island: Reign of Kong photography

Image credits: All three photographs are official Universal Orlando Resort publicity images from the resort's media site. They show the attraction in normal operation and are not photographs of its current state.