‘Oh, we’re stuck now’: Video captures scary moment when roller coaster gets stuck at vertical drop
AUSTIN, Texas —
Riders in Texas experienced a frightening moment after a roller coaster paused in a vertical position for nine minutes during the amusement park’s opening weekend, forcing riders to evacuate.
It happened at the new amusement park COTALAND in Austin, Texas, on its Circuit Breaker roller coaster. The ride has a “tilt” feature where it pivots and pauses at a high point of the ride before resuming. The ride stopped for nine minutes, causing riders to evacuate and walk down approximately 100 steps to get down, KXAN reported.
“Maybe it’s just a little delayed,” Nicholas Thomas, who had already ridden the ride multiple times, told KXAN. “One second turns into two seconds turns into three seconds, and that’s when I realized, like, ‘Oh, we’re stuck now.'”
The roller coaster paused again for about two minutes at the same spot on Sunday before the ride resumed. No one was hurt in either of the incidents.
The Circuit Breaker has been operating since October 2025 and reaches up to 130 feet high, according to KTBC.
The amusement park is on the property of the Circuit of the Americas racetrack.
The roller coaster is at the center of a lawsuit filed in May based on a December malfunction when it was stuck for nearly an hour, according to reports.