The public bike rental service YouBike was temporarily suspended in six cities and counties in northern and central Taiwan yesterday morning due to software damage during a system update, but the service was expected to resume normal operations within two days, YouBike spokesperson Liu Li-chu (劉麗珠) said.
Liu said that the system went down at 1:30am when an update of the remote-control system of the parking slots failed.
The system breakdown has resulted in the malfunction of 17,317 parking slots in Taipei, New Taipei City, Hsinchu, Taoyuan, Taichung and Changhua, and affected 140,000 people, including 100,000 to 110,000 users in the greater Taipei area, Liu said.
Photo: Kuo Yi, Taipei Times
Liu said that the company has informed the public transportation departments of the cities and counties and sent engineers to YouBike parking lots around the nation to repair the control system.
The service in Taichung and Changhua is expected to resume sooner than others, Liu added.
The glitch is estimated to have caused at least NT$1 million (US$31,530) in financial losses in Taipei and New Taipei City.
Soon after the system went down, the company’s management urged users to take other forms of transportation to get to their destinations.
The large-scale breakdown is unprecedented in the history of the public bike rental system, which was formally launched in Taipei in November 2012 and was expanded to New Taipei City at the end of 2013, to Taichung and Changhua in 2014 and then to Taoyuan and Hsinchu this year.
CROSS-STRAIT COLLABORATION: The new KMT chairwoman expressed interest in meeting the Chinese president from the start, but she’ll have to pay to get in Beijing allegedly agreed to let Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) around the Lunar New Year holiday next year on three conditions, including that the KMT block Taiwan’s arms purchases, a source said yesterday. Cheng has expressed interest in meeting Xi since she won the KMT’s chairmanship election in October. A source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a consensus on a meeting was allegedly reached after two KMT vice chairmen visited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) in China last month. Beijing allegedly gave the KMT three conditions it had to
STAYING ALERT: China this week deployed its largest maritime show of force to date in the region, prompting concern in Taipei and Tokyo, which Beijing has brushed off Deterring conflict over Taiwan is a priority, the White House said in its National Security Strategy published yesterday, which also called on Japan and South Korea to increase their defense spending to help protect the first island chain. Taiwan is strategically positioned between Northeast and Southeast Asia, and provides direct access to the second island chain, with one-third of global shipping passing through the South China Sea, the report said. Given the implications for the US economy, along with Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” it said. However, the strategy also reiterated
‘BALANCE OF POWER’: Hegseth said that the US did not want to ‘strangle’ China, but to ensure that none of Washington’s allies would be vulnerable to military aggression Washington has no intention of changing the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, adding that one of the US military’s main priorities is to deter China “through strength, not through confrontation.” Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Hegseth outlined the US Department of Defense’s priorities under US President Donald Trump. “First, defending the US homeland and our hemisphere. Second, deterring China through strength, not confrontation. Third, increased burden sharing for us, allies and partners. And fourth, supercharging the US defense industrial base,” he said. US-China relations under
FRAUD ISSUES: The app meets none of Taiwan’s 15 cybersecurity standards, and in the past year, about 1,706 fraud cases have been identified on it The Ministry of the Interior yesterday ordered Taiwanese Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (小紅書, also known as RedNote in English) for a year, after detecting hundreds of instances of fraud on the platform. The ISPs have been instructed to block access to the app to its more than 3 million users in Taiwan, effective immediately, Deputy Minister of the Interior Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元) told a news conference at the National Police Agency’s Fraud Prevention Center. The order is being implemented via protocols governing domain name system (DNS) response policy zones, he said. Xiaohongshu meets none
RSS