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.
@srazzi So sorry we let you down, Steff. We should be back up and running now!
— Uber NYC (@Uber_NYC) August 8, 2015
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.
