Amazon outage took out Citibike at peak of rush hour

‘There’s nothing worse than waking up in the morning and running around like a headless chicken trying to get your Citibike working’

An outage at an Amazon data centre left commuters stranded as the shutdown took out the Citibike bike-share system in New York City.

The issues began just after 7am, as monthly subscribers grew confused and annoyed as they were unable to unlock the bikes.

A spokesperson for ride-hailing company Lyft, Citibike’s parent organisation, said that the bike-sharing stations were starting to come back online at around 9.20am, according to Gothamist, but some riders had continuing problems.

Commuters outside Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan tried, without success, to connect to the bikes using their phones.

“At morning rush? Are you kidding me?” Paul Mindolovich said, after being told about the outage by a customer service representative, Gothamist reported. “Take this off my yearly subscription.”

The outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) was connected to problems at a data centre in northern Virginia, the company said. The failure also caused issues at Slack, the Epic Games store, and a platform for exchanging cryptocurrency that uses AWS’ servers.

Citibike, which uses AWS, had around 70,000 riders every day in November, and Wednesday’s outage was a least the third time this month that the bike-sharing system had been affected, according to the parent company.

“It’s certainly something that’s of concern to us and we’re investigating ways to build redundancy into the system,” a Lyft spokesperson said. “You can trust us when we say we’re as frustrated as our riders.”

Citibike uses an app that riders can pull up to unlock a bike, which requires a server connection.

“If the subway didn’t work and they told you it’s because AWS is down, people would be pretty upset,” software engineer and Citibike user Nick Hanley told the outlet. “So I’m not sure that’s an acceptable answer.”

Mr Hanley tried several stations in Chinatown, with no luck. He then grabbed a cab to work instead.

“There’s nothing worse than waking up in the morning and running around like a headless chicken trying to get your Citibike working and having them let you down,” he said.