BART Service Resumes After Network Failure Disrupts Morning Commute

BART service resumed Thursday morning after a computer hardware failure caused a temporary disruption, according to the transit agency.

The issue temporarily shut down service between West Oakland and 24th Street, and halted the Red and Green Lines, affecting thousands of riders during the morning commute. Service was restored just before 9 a.m.

Jenny Orbell, a BART rider in West Oakland, said she was going to have to take multiple buses to get to her office in downtown San Francisco, where she has to deliver a presentation at 11:30 a.m.

“Hopefully I’ll make it in time,” she said, noting that there also were no Ubers picking up from the station. “Not ideal.”

During the 45-minute outage, BART’s operations control center was unable to control routing, and its public announcement system was down, according to BART assistant general manager Shane Edwards. He told the agency’s board of directors Thursday that a computer network hardware failure at the Lake Merritt station caused the outage.

“That was a single-point of failure,” Edwards said.

In an update on social media, BART said that it was able to restore service after cutting to another device.

Edwards said the agency would look “tonight” for a long-term fix for the issue.

The meltdown is the second service disruption on BART this week, after an RV fire in West Oakland sizzled critical radio communication cables, and the latest in a series of major incidents affecting service in the past year, as the agency deals with a major financial crisis. BART has struggled to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, which tanked ridership and led to an increase in long-term remote work.

Board Director Janice Li said the repeated outages hurt the transit system’s efforts to recoup daily riders.

“I was already seeing people being like, ‘Is BART the right decision for me right now?’” she said during the Thursday directors’ meeting. “We could be in such an even better place if we weren’t having these service outages. It just breaks trust with our riders.”

She said even though the disruption was short, 45 minutes “makes all the difference” for commuters.

At MacArthur Station in Oakland, Katherine Sanderlin was left hanging during her commute into San Francisco. She said she moved here from New York City, where she said she believes buses would have been “ready to go” if the subway were interrupted.

“The frustrating thing for me about the infrastructure here is that it’s not centered on the experience of people trying to do their work in the city. And that is hard,” she told KQED.

KQED’s Blanca Torres, Eliza Peppel and Adhiti Bandlamudi contributed to this report.