Happy Friday
I'm reaching out to let you know that hackers are not responsible for the estimated 2,200 digital parking meters throughout the downtown and Waikiki areas that suddenly stopped accepting credit cards on Wednesday.
According to the Department of Transportation Services, the culprit was Verizon - they shut down their 3G network. Verizon announced back in 2016 that 3G was being decommissioned and the City of Honolulu was given official notice in 2019 but were not made aware that the final shutdown would happen this week. Unfortunately the city has been slow to upgrade the meters.
So how you park in a metered stall?
The Honolulu Police Department will temporarily suspend the issuing of citations for affected meters and it could be six months or more before the meters are updated.
You can put quarters into meters for now but the city believes (as they have been told by vendors) that within a few weeks that all electronic meters will stop accepting coins all together. Strictly coin operated meters are still monitored though, so watch where you park.
Again, hackers weren't responsible for this outage (this time!)
Stay safe out there
-A
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