A MoviePass Outage Crashed the App Friday Night – Here’s How to Get a Refund

A strange scene descended upon movie theaters across the country Friday night. Dozens of confused moviegoers loitered outside movie theater lobbies, furiously swiping at their phones while MoviePass headquarters likely received hundreds of phone calls complaining about the app being down. A MoviePass outage had foiled Friday movie night, on the weekend that the latest Marvel Studios movie had premiered and the ticket-buying service was meant to roll out its divisive peak pricing feature.

But have no fear. If you ended up throwing down your phone in frustration and buying the tickets yourself, there’s a way to get a refund from MoviePass.

Around 6:oo p.m. EST on Friday, MoviePass subscribers found that they could not access the app to purchase tickets to movies. It’s unknown how widespread this issue was, but a quick glance through Twitter seemed to suggest that the app was experiencing an outage nationwide. About four hours later, the app seemed to be running smoothly again, but by that time many users had just given up on trying to access MoviePass and had bought tickets the old-fashioned way: with their own money.

Luckily, MoviePass responded to the outage by offering to reimburse all users who had bought their own tickets Friday night.

Users are welcome to purchase tickets out of pocket and we will issue a refund. Starting tomorrow, please send us chat through the MoviePass app showing the full receipt including the movie title, showtime, and theater for a reimbursement. Thank you again for your understanding.

— MoviePass (@MoviePass) July 6, 2018

MoviePass said that any subscriber could take a picture of their ticket receipt and send it through the MoviePass chat. Reimbursements would be sent directly to their account.

On Saturday, MoviePass recommended that users ensure that their apps are updated before they go to the theaters, saying that it’s “rolled out some important stability changes and peak pricing” updates. As someone who was a witness to the Outage of Friday the 6th, I was easily able to get a ticket to Ant-Man and the Wasp the next day after updates, so it seems like those changes may have fixed MoviePass’ bugs.

MoviePass has not released a statement explaining the reason for the outage, though there’s a strong likelihood that it was related to its new (and newly unpopular) peak pricing feature, which would charge users higher monthly fees for tickets bought to in-demand movies. It’s just the latest bad PR event for MoviePass, which continues to roll out baffling and divisive features like surge pricing and the newly launched distribution and production company MoviePass Films. And with AMC hot on its heels with its own ticket-buying service, it may not be a good time for MoviePass to run into technical issues. But hey, at least you’ll get your money’s worth.

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