On Friday morning at 3:15 a.m., a technology upgrade triggered a cascading failure across the whole BART system, shutting it down across the entire Bay Area for the morning commute. It impacted riders on their way to work, to classes, to flights. Train service wasn't fully restored until 11:45 a.m. Its the second full-system outage in four months caused by a technology issue.
BART service in San Francisco and the Peninsula is down this morning due to computer equipment issues. BART was initially down system wide, but East Bay service resumed around 9:30 a.m., according to BART's twitter. In the meantime, BART is urging commuters to find alternative means of transportation, including taking AC Transit buses over the bridge. At the BART stations at 24th and Mission and 16th and Mission, BART police officers are currently waiving away commuters. MUNI is currently allowing commuters affected by the BART shutdown to ride for free between Embarcadero and Balboa Park, the two ends of San Francisco's BART stops.
One of the reasons why we don't have service is cause we were actually upgrading our computer network last night. It's a massive ongoing project. We don't just work on it one night a week. And so that is part of rebuilding BART, which is part of being a 50-plus-year-old system. It's unfortunate absolutely. We're gonna find out what went wrong.