A buggy upgrade took £400,000 in wrong parking charges from Worcester drivers

On 2023-05-02 the BBC reported that card payments were being reintroduced at Worcester's 14 council-run car parks after problems in which more than 200,000 erroneous payments totalling £400,000 were taken from customers. Card transactions had been suspended since September 2022.

During the 2022 problems, card customers were incorrectly charged multiple times for single transactions in mix-ups affecting 15,000 parking sessions; one customer told the BBC he had seen almost £800 wrongly taken across dozens of separate debits. Flowbird Smart City UK, the company behind the affected machines, said the issue was connected to a bug that emerged during a software upgrade. The city council said all customers were reimbursed.

Rather than repair the machines, the council moved to a new partner, Metric Group, which began installing replacement payment machines with the rollout expected to complete by the end of the month. At five of the lowest-demand car parks — Clare St, Tallow Hill, Tybridge St, Commandery Road and The Moors — payments would be app or phone line only.

More than 200,000 erroneous payments totalling £400,000 across 15,000 sessions at 14 council-run car parks; card payments suspended from September 2022

A bug introduced during a software upgrade multiplied single card charges many times over

The faults ran long enough to rack up 200,000 wrong payments across 15,000 sessions before card acceptance was pulled

The council lost confidence and replaced the vendor rather than patch the deployment

A payments upgrade needs a duplicate-charge alarm before rollout — one bad deploy cost the vendor its contract

As of 2023-05-02 new Metric Group machines were being installed across the 14 sites, all affected customers had been reimbursed, and five low-demand car parks were moving to app-or-phone payment only.