LinkNYC’s Wrinkle In Time

I have spotted this glitch a number of times. Yesterday might have been March 3rd for most of us but LinkNYC thought otherwise. Offering up helpful alerts concerning New Year’s Eve plans and an AP headline from December it looked like this and several other machines I passed decided it was December 29th all over again.

This particular machine also sported a non-working tablet screen. Down for at least 24 hours this location was reported as being in CityBridge’s dataset which purports to give an hourly snapshot of which LinkNYC machines work and which do not. The cynic in me thinks that dataset publishes locations at random, and that no functional kiosk monitoring system even exists. Also not reflected in the LinkNYC kiosk status report was that the phone did not work either.

Watching Smart City machines step back in time a couple of months is good for a laugh, I suppose, and the number of machines with this glitch seemed isolated. But consider the possibilities of confusion spreading if LinkNYC machines all over town started spitting up long-expired emergency alerts and months-old headlines. Think of what happened in Hawaii last year, when warnings of incoming nuclear missiles mistakenly went out to every cell phone in the state, causing panic. On LinkNYC I have seen alerts warning of major storms that happened weeks or months previous. This relatively innocuous headline from late December cycled through yesterday.