Every person's nightmare on their way to work —
this is exactly what happened. Gothamist reports that Citibike riders were recently left stranded after an outage at an Amazon Datacenter knocked out the service to the bike-share system during the height of morning rush hour.
Commuters voiced frustration when they couldn't access Citi Bikes Wednesday morning. GWYNNE HOGAN
The disruption began around 7AM, sparking complaints and confusion from monthly subscribers who were unable to unlock a bike. A spokesperson for Lyft, the Citi Bike parent company, had said that the stations were coming back online as of 9:20AM, though some riders were still experiencing issues.
The Amazon Web Services failure was tied to a data center failure in northern Virginia, according to Amazon. It affected several online services, including Slack, the Epic Games store, and a cryptocurrency exchange platform.
While CitiBikes served an average of 70,000 riders per day last month, the unexplained disruption only highlighted the ongoing challenges in linking a growing transportation system with an outage-prone cloud computer provider.
The incident was at least the third AWS outage this month to affect CitiBike services, according to Lyft. Like many bike-share systems, CitiBike relies on an app-based unlocking system that requires a connection to a server. The key fobs that were sent to early members also experienced issues, though they were not as widespread.
As stations begin to come back online, bike-share users were not entirely buying the explanation from Lyft.
