Amazon Outage Again Hits NYC, Halts Citi Bike

NEW YORK CITY — Another Amazon Web Services outage caused frustration for Citi Bike riders and other New Yorkers who had vital online tools stutter.

The nationwide outage Wednesday— the third in as many weeks — affected Fortnite, Hinge, Hulu, Peloton, Slack, among other sites, services and apps . It also struck Citi Bike just as New Yorkers tried to snag bicycles during the morning commute.

"I just tried three different stations in Brooklyn that are offline," one rider tweeted. "Is the whole system down?"

@CitiBikeNYC I just tried three different stations in Brooklyn that are offline. Is the whole system down?
— Heather Boyer (@HMBoyer) December 22, 2021

Citi Bike's Twitter account confirmed the entire bike-share system was experiencing "technical difficulties."

Spokesperson Jordan Levine told Patch the difficulties were linked to the Amazon outage.

“Due to an AWS data center outage, many riders have been unable to unlock a Citi Bike this morning," he said in a statement. "Stations are coming back online as of 9:20 AM and we will continue to provide updates as we get them.”

Amazon representatives said the outage — which was caused by a loss of power in a data center — is being resolved. They had "restored power to all instances and network devices within the affected data center" and that network connectivity had returned to normal, they said in a statement released at 8:39 a.m.

New York City found itself affected by two previous outages in recent weeks. The first affected the East Coast and disrupted the Amazon.com site itself in the city.

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Amazon Web Services Outage Affects Services Across The Internet