Bay Area Rapid Transit, the main commuter rail system for the region, was forced to close for most of the Friday morning commute.
The primary transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area was forced to shut down all trains for several hours on Friday morning because of a computer problem, sending commuters scrambling to find alternatives before service resumed shortly after 9 a.m. local time.
Bay Area Rapid Transit, which transports more than 170,000 passengers on weekdays throughout much of the region, said service had been suspended because of a “computer networking” problem. A spokesman for BART said that there had been an issue with powering the train control system, preventing trains from operating.
Though train service had resumed across the system, major delays were expected.
The outage came as BART has struggled mightily to attract passengers after the Covid-19 pandemic. Many residents in the tech-driven Bay Area have been able to continue working remotely, and BART has faced one of the steepest declines in ridership of any major U.S. transit system. Passenger traffic on the Bay Area system remains less than half of what it was before the pandemic, according to the American Public Transportation Association.
It was not immediately clear what had caused the networking problem. During the morning commute, traffic was thick at the freeway to the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland and other East Bay communities to San Francisco. Riders searched for alternatives, from car pools to local bus services and ferries.
Chris Filippi, a spokesman for BART, said in a statement that the computer issues had affected all 50 stations within the system.
At the El Cerrito Plaza station in the East Bay city of El Cerrito, Calif., a BART official turned away commuters wearing backpacks and clutching big tote bags before service resumed. A handful of commuters stood on the curb anxiously browsing through ride-share options and looking at bus maps.
