BART Outage Is Over After Second Systemwide Meltdown in Months

BART resumed all service just before noon Friday, ending an hourslong system shutdown that left thousands of commuters scrambling for alternative routes around the Bay Area during peak commute hours.

A limited number of trains operating within the East Bay resumed around 9:30 a.m., but it took hours longer to get trains running to and from San Francisco, as people who found themselves stranded waited for any answers.

“’I’m so tired,” said Shantay Clark, who was arriving at the shuttered station on Powell Street at 10 a.m. She had just finished an overnight shift at her security job and had planned to take BART home to the East Bay.

“I’m ready to get home because I have to come back to the city, and I’m just hoping that later on tonight, when it gets time for me to commute, that transportation is up and running,” she said.

“I’m exhausted, and to be honest, I shouldn’t say what I want to say, because I want a drink,” she continued.

The outage was the second BART has experienced in recent months, though the agency said it did not know if Friday’s issue was related to May’s.

The transit agency said that after conducting a network upgrade overnight, it had a computer equipment problem that prevented it from beginning service shortly before 5 a.m.

Throughout the morning, BART employees working at stations in San Francisco were directing riders headed to the East Bay to take a bus or the ferry, which was looking to expand capacity on regularly scheduled transbay trips and add additional trips on its Oakland route.

“The only way to get there, I was told, is that you have to go on a bus,” said Angelina Rivera, who was headed to the courthouse in Martinez. “I don’t know where the bus is, but you have to go on the bus. … It’s been a little crazy morning so far, just kind of wasting a little more time than expected.”

Arlene Gemmell was hoping to meet her sister, who was visiting from Oregon, in the East Bay before they headed over to their hometown in Mill Valley.

“It’s her last full day here,” she told KQED, adding that she would probably just head home. “I’m really let down, but sort of relieved too. I’m tired, so I don’t know, maybe we can do it tomorrow.”

The transit shutdown had rippling effects on other Bay Area commutes.

Muni said it experienced minor delays after an earlier warning that its buses might run behind as its operators struggled to travel into the city, the transit agency said on social media.

Traffic also backed up quickly on Bay Area freeways as more people opted to drive to or from San Francisco.

During May’s four-hour outage, traffic on the Bay Bridge backed up for miles as hundreds more cars traveled across than during the same time in previous weeks. The San Mateo-Hayward and Dumbarton bridges were similarly affected.

That outage was blamed on two network devices “that were not properly communicating to each other,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told KQED at the time.

The two shutdowns are BART’s largest since 2019, and come as it and other Bay Area transit systems are lobbying the state Legislature to place a measure on November’s ballot that would fill a more than $1 billion hole left by state budget cuts.

The region’s transit operators were already struggling to recover from low ridership after the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent data shows they are facing a more than $3.7 billion combined deficit over the next five years, most of which comes from BART and Muni.

BART has said that if it’s unable to patch the budget hole, it might have to cancel two of its five lines, shorten service hours or run less frequent trains.