'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

A Zipcar car and a person holding their phone with the Zipcar app open

(Image credit: Zipcar)

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.

"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.

"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."

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