TTC Subway Outage

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(Updated)

It was only out of service for an hour and a half but the effects of this morning’s Toronto subway shutdown are still being felt. Trains were busy carrying a backlog of commuters and TTC officials are trying to find out what caused the communications breakdown.

Riders were sent into the streets in the pouring rain, scrambling to find another way to get to where they need to go. The TTC says there was a failure with a radio communications system. They tried using a backup; that crashed as well. The communication issue also effected emails, phones and the eBlast system which the TTC uses to inform customers of service interruptions.

TTC spokesperson Danny Nicholson told CHCH News they are trying to get to the bottom of what happened. “Shortly after 6 o’clock this morning we lost all communications between the transit control centre and the subway train, so that is a very serious safety issue. We had to order all of the subway trains to stop at the next station.”

“The delay lasted for approximately 95 minutes. It would have impacted about 125,000 of our customers at this time in the morning. Subway service resumed around 7:30. At this point we are trying to ascertain what would happen. We are working on that to figure out the cause of the situation.”

Commuters were on edge. #TTCFail began trending on Twitter relatively quickly. People were outraged that the TTC did not send out shuttle buses to the subway stations.

The agency said there were not enough buses to deploy at the time. People began calling taxis. Uber increased their normal rate by at least 4.5 times what it usually was. Bus and streetcars were completely packed; other people started walking. Still others went home and got their cars which made it worse on the downtown city streets.

The TTC says once they come up with an explanation and why they determine why the failure took place they will issue a statement. They also say they are confident that something like this will never happen again.