Lightsail/wordpress cron job not working

I recently migrated a wordpress site to lightsail. This site requires a cron job that runs on an hourly basis to send email reminders. The site works great but when the cron job runs it doesn't send the notifications, the job never finishes, and seems hang the site after some time. I've tried running both as bitnami (crontab -e) and as root (sudo crontab -e) neither work and both exhibit the same behavior. Following is the command line I am using for the cron job:

0 * * * * /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php -q /bitnami/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/modern-events-calendar/app/crons/booking-reminder.php

I suspect I am doing something wrong or missing something. The same site and job ran fine on bluehost before moving to lightsail.