Spare Incident Report

May 15, 2026

Executive Summary

On May 15, 2026 the Spare platform experienced a significant service disruption impacting organizations within our US1 data residency region. The incident was characterized by an inability to book new trips for all customers in the US1 region, from both the admin and rider interfaces, as well as degradation to driver app navigation and viewing driver routes on the live map for a more limited set of customers in the US1 region. The disruption originated from an infrastructure change to our Open Street Maps Routing system.

Our engineering team restored service by reverting the infrastructure change. Errors started at 9:47 am PT, and service was fully restored to all affected organizations 11 minutes later, at 9:58 am PT.

Incident Details

The errors began at 9:47 am PT. Monitoring systems and user reports indicated greatly elevated error rates from the Open Street Maps Routing system. This caused an inability to book new trips for all customers in the US1 region, from both the admin and rider interfaces, as well as degradation to driver app navigation and viewing driver routes on the live map for a more limited set of customers in the US1 region. Specifically, users with the “Google navigation” driver app had no driver impact, but those using the “Mapbox navigation” driver app had a very elevated rate of errors when the app attempted to re-route (driver leaving the expected route, or completing pickups/dropoffs).

An infrastructure change intended to improve how quickly the system can respond to load spikes was identified as the core cause, and this change was rolled back. The change had rolled out successfully in testing and staging environments, but failed in an unexpected way under the load of the US1 data residency region. The change was reverted and all errors stopped at 9:58 am PT.

Cause

The primary root cause was an infrastructure change to how our Open Street Maps Routing system runs and scales. The change was intended to make the system quicker to respond to load spikes, but in the US1 region failed in an unexpected way under full load, underscaling and the system could not keep up with demand, resulting in a greatly elevated error rate.

Resolution

Reverting the infrastructure change brought the system back to stability 11 minutes after the incident began.

Timeline

All times are in Pacific Time (PT).

• 9:47 am: Incident begins; high error rates from the Open Street Maps Routing system detected in the US1 region.
• 9:56 am: Root cause identified, change reverted.
• 9:58 am: Full service restored to all US1 organizations.

Next Steps

To prevent a recurrence of this failure, we’re undertaking the following:

• Root Cause Analysis: Understand all details around the change failing in an unexpected way under load.
• Load Testing Future Similar Changes: Identifying better ways to test similar changes under full load, and to roll out more gradually, to mitigate issues like these that occur only under full load.

We recognize the critical role our platform plays in your daily operations and the significant impact this outage had on your riders, administrators and drivers. We sincerely apologize for the disruption and are committed to strengthening our infrastructure to prevent a repeat of this issue, and to consistently achieve the uptime and reliability you expect from Spare.