As reported by many news outlets including WLRN, Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald, Sunpass had an outage in or around June 5th. The efforts to resolve the outage were expected to last about a week but it took nearly a month.
The outage was due to Sunpass’ attempt to implement a centralized customer service system along with an update to their phone and computer systems. The problem is that while the system is down, Sunpass will still collect tolls via transponders and pay-by-toll methods and during that time, no charges were processed. The ugly side affects are that many users will see an unexpected increase to your SunPass account due to backlogged billing.
Sunpass has slowly began processing charges and you can see progress on the Sunpass homepage but more importantly, you will begin to see back to back charges to your account and you should receive receipts for every deduction made to your credit card on file.
You are urged to sign into your account and check your transactions and take some time to review licene plates on your account as well as daily usage. Ever since Sunpass switch to automatic tolls and billing, we lost the ability to manage and control our tolls and there are speculations that people can have multiple billing errors including double billing.
There is also a petition you can sign to get Sunpass to NOT CHARGE TOLLS during the outage period. You can sign the petition here and share it with your friends and family.
Steps you can take to make sure you are not over charged or get caught by surprise during this period.
1. Log into your Sunpass account and verify verify verify (This is a pain but lookout for yourself).
2. Sign the petition to make sure you’re not charged during the outage.
3. Contact Sunpass if you notice any errors or have any billing disputes.
4. Share with everyone you know!
Sunpass is a great system that makes paying tolls easy but the trade off with this ease of use is the control we have over what we buy and what we pay for. Automation of tolls is not perfect as you can see from this example and keeping control over your account is the only way we can make sure we don’t get screwed!
References:
https://www.sunpass.com/en/support/news.shtml
https://www.sunpass.com/en/common/docs/Sunpass_FDOT_Update.pdf