Austin: This year's SXSW Conference and Festivals poses one of the biggest challenges to the fledgling ride-hailing companies that stepped into the void when Uber and Lyft left Austin last year after a contentious battle with the city.

How are they doing? Depends who you ask.

Fare, Fasten and RideAustin drivers have been swarming the city since the start of the massive tech-film-music gathering on Friday, ferrying passengers around different events. On Saturday night, they had one of their biggest stumbles.

RideAustin, created by local tech leaders in the wake of Uber and Lyft's departure, went down Saturday for several hours as demand mounted during peak nighttime hours. In a lengthy Facebook post the next day, the company apologised to users and detailed how a peak in demand caused a "database lock" of one of its databases.

The rideshare company has logged around 45,000 rides since attendees began arriving in Austin for SXSW, including 15,000 on Saturday, despite their issues, it said.

"Austin Community -- our personal apologies in letting you down for several hours tonight," the statement said. "We are 100% up and going again."

Fasten, which also operates in Austin, lost service for just under an hour on Saturday night. Fare seemed to work for some users, but not others, and their drivers were delayed, according to some customers and social media posts.

"Unfortunately, we were down for a little bit less than an hour last night," Kirill Evdakov, Fasten's CEO, told Recode. "It was Saturday night, so during the busiest hour of the busiest night."

The mea culpas didn't stop the tech-savvy crowd from posting their frustration with the ride-hailing breakdown. "What a disaster for #sxsw," @Jason wrote on Twitter, "like going back to the stone ages. Rent a car! Find parking! More traffic! Ugh."

Austin-area voters in May rejected a proposal by Uber and Lyft to self-regulate their drivers and mandated stricter rules on the companies, including fingerprint background checks on drivers. Instead of abiding by the rules, the two companies shut down services in Austin.

The other companies filled in quickly and are widely used by locals, but SXSW was their first major challenge. The yearly gathering draws more than 80,000 attendees to the Austin area, as well as thousands more who come for events attached to the conference, creating high-volume demand for the services.

Some riders said the alternatives worked fine. Jared Culpepper, a Houston-based social media marketer and video producer, said he knew of Uber and Lyft's departure from Austin and downloaded some of the other apps as SXSW neared. He's used Fasten often around Austin, with generally little problems, except for Saturday night, he said.

"Yes, it was annoying to have to set up a new app for just this one city," Culpepper said, "but you do what you have to do."

Others said they were not comfortable trying ridesharing companies not named Uber or Lyft. David Schwartz, an oncologist from Memphis, said he discovered that Uber and Lyft didn't operate in Austin while planning his trip to SXSW. Instead of trying the other companies, he opted to rent a car.

"You're enslaved to the national brands," said Schwartz, who was at SXSW speaking about his research of using Uber to transport cancer patients to treatment. "It's become such a component of day-to-day life, that not having it makes you feel naked." ---

USA Today