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Uber's App Went Down in NYC This Morning (Lyft's Time to Shine)

Even the short outage blips show Uber's dependency on smooth-running data centers.

Uber, the ride-hailing app valued at $51 billion, suffered an issue with its ride-hailing app in New York City on Saturday morning. Several users in the city noted on Twitter that firing up the app brought them a “Service Unavailable” page. Uber’s New York Twitter account confirmed a “brief outage.”

In February 2014, an issue with Uber’s data storage caused a nationwide outage of over an hour, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Last month, Uber scooped up a package of technology and employees from Microsoft, including a data center in Boulder, Colo.

Unlike other (once more common) Web outages — the Gmail spams and the Twitter Fail Whale — a hiccup in Uber’s app demonstrates how its users rely on the service’s regular transportation, a real physical-world thing. And so, it demonstrates how important a smooth data backend is to Uber.

It looks like the app returned by midday. We reached out to Uber, and will add more if we have it.

Update: Here’s the statement from Uber: “Everything is up and running again, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience to riders or drivers.” Asked if it stemmed from a data center issue, the company rep declined to comment.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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