‘I’ve been waiting over 4 hours in the cold’: Zipcar’s Black Friday-related car sharing outage left some users locked out of their rides like leg-using chumps

You might have seen bike share schemes in some cities—you know, the ones you can unlock, ride around, and leave in a different location—but have you seen car share schemes? Maybe I’m too much of a small-town bumpkin, but I certainly hadn’t. Not until I heard about them causing all kinds of kerfuffle last week.

According to 404 Media, one such car share scheme, Zipcar, experienced an outage that caused a “clusterf***” on Black Friday. Customers were left locked out of the cars they’d rented, sometimes for hours on end, and were then summarily charged for the privilege. All because the Zipcar app went down.

Imagine that: You rent a car to “zip” to the store and buy some bread, and next thing you know you’re locked out of it, sitting on the curb for five hours waiting to be told you owe money for no reason at all. You’ll be refunded, of course, but that might take a while.

In fact, we don’t need hypotheticals. Here’s what 404 Media says one customer reported:

“This is insane. Rented a car and went to buy a quick drink to the store and all of [a] sudden the car is locked. I’ve been waiting over 4 hours in the cold. No help whatsoever, different answers and stuck waiting for an hour to speak with someone and no help. All my things inside, even my house keys and no way of getting them. This is so crazy and frustrating.”

All of this because of an app outage—the Zipcar app is what allows you to lock/unlock the car as well as start/end the rental, so if the app stops working, you’re screwed. Ars Technica points out that this didn’t used to be the case, because Zipcar used to include physical keys inside locked cars and members would receive actual Zipcards to open the cars up. But that hasn’t been the case for a while—it’s all app-based, now.

Now I’m quite the risk-averse chap, but even those better-suited to risk than I can’t deny it’s probably not great to have an app be a single link holding a very precarious chain of car share services together. And if it is a single link holding that chain together, you sure as hell better make sure it holds up.

The reason it didn’t hold up on Friday is apparently due to the… uh… SMS/MMS network?

Zipcar told Ars Technica: “During part of Friday afternoon, we experienced a rare outage related to increased site traffic. Interest in our Black Friday promotion caused SMS delivery service constraints on the SMS/MMS network for our site and many others, unfortunately.

“For a small percentage of our members who were not already logged into our mobile app, this resulted in login difficulties, impacting their reservations. While this issue is resolved, we’re also working to prevent it from reoccurring.”

The company also told Ars that “responses have varied by case but include refunding reservations, providing driving credit for future trips, and refunding alternate transportation.”

While Zipcar hasn’t revealed exactly how many people were affected, it did say that it affected “a small percentage of our members who were not already logged into our mobile app”.

I don’t even like storing unimportant files solely in the cloud lest something go wrong, so I’m probably not the target market anyway, but I know I won’t be risking a long car journey with someone using a car that relies solely on an app staying live to prevent me from becoming stranded. That’s just me, though. At least people are getting refunds.