The Skill Issue Institute celebrates Prof. Authentication Pending (Class of 2020) for groundbreaking work in eliminating unnecessary physical redundancies from vehicle access systems, demonstrated spectacularly on Black Friday 2024.
Prof. Pending’s career at a major car-sharing service focused on streamlining the user experience by removing outdated concepts like physical keys and membership cards. The elegant result: an entirely app-dependent system where locking, unlocking, and accessing vehicles required successful SMS authentication. On November 29th, when Black Friday traffic surged across the platform, the SMS authentication system encountered what our Systems Architecture faculty describes as “cascading retry amplification.” As cellular networks became congested with authentication requests, users repeatedly tapped the login button, generating even more SMS requests in a beautiful feedback loop.
The impact was comprehensive. Customers found themselves locked out of vehicles they had already rented, standing in parking lots as temperatures dropped. Others were unable to return cars, watching helplessly as rental charges accumulated. Personal belongings, including house keys, wallets, and in at least one case a passport, remained tantalizingly visible through car windows yet completely inaccessible. One group of travelers found themselves stranded at an outlet mall two hours outside Los Angeles until after dark, ultimately paying over a hundred dollars for a taxi while one member missed his flight and his final exam.
Social media filled with reports of customers waiting four or more hours in the cold, unable to reach support, watching their phones display the same authentication screen that had become both their lifeline and their prison.
“The previous system included physical Zipcards and keys inside locked vehicles,” Prof. Pending explained during their presentation at our Annual Single Points of Failure Symposium. “We identified these as unnecessary redundancies that complicated the user experience. Our app-only approach worked flawlessly in testing.”
When services eventually recovered, many customers discovered surprise charges of hundreds of dollars for extended rentals they couldn’t end, with refunds taking days to process. The company attributed the outage to “increased site traffic and SMS requests to authenticate login,” praising cellular network congestion as a contributing factor.
Prof. Pending’s work serves as an inspiration to students in our “It Works On My Machine” program, demonstrating that removing physical fallbacks truly separates the committed from the merely cautious.
Original source: Nightmare Zipcar outage is a warning against complete app dependency