Uber's App Malfunctioned Across the Country for Short Period

The Uber app stopped working briefly for people across the United States and also in parts of Canada Friday afternoon. The outage lasted roughly fifteen minutes, not exactly a crisis.

That said it’s the second Uber app malfunction this month, which raises the question whether the ridehailing company is hitting technical scaling issues as it grows in popularity.

Users as far flung as North Carolina and Los Angeles tweeted about their issues. Some said their app showed no cars available, while others said they were in Uber rides and the app stopped working. One account even showed an Uber car headed through the high seas to pick up its passenger.
https://twitter.com/Aish_16489/status/634867533082787840

When asked for comment, Uber directed us to its recent tweet, “Some riders & drivers may experience issues requesting and completing trips. Our team is on it and things should be back to normal shortly.” The Uber Canada account blamed server issues for the problem.

https://twitter.com/Uber_Support/status/634865526607474688

Given that Uber’s brand is all about efficient, reliable rides and people depend on Uber to get places, it’s more problematic for the company to have outages than a purely digital, social company like Facebook.

That said, many of those on Twitter who faced issues cracked jokes and cut the company some slack.
https://twitter.com/TheDaileyRandy/status/634867685851951104
https://twitter.com/prointegr8/status/634867730114473988
https://twitter.com/JonBromstein/status/634867516649639936

The developments come only two weeks after Uber’s New York app stopped working during a Saturday morning. When asked whether server malfunctions caused that problem, Uber didn’t respond.

This story has been updated to reflect that the app is back to normal.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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