Bleary-eyed Bay Area commuters shuffling into BART stations on the morning of 18 May were met with a uniform screen of bad news on ticket machines: “Out of Service”.
The system-wide glitch left straphangers stranded and unable to reload their physical Clipper cards. Commuters scrambled to figure out how to use their phones to pay their fare, while at least one BART station agent elected to open the emergency gate to let riders in, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
What initially seemed like a minor annoyance had quickly escalated into a full-blown transit nightmare as the outage swept through every single station, paralyzing fare collection for an alarming 27 hours.
When the cause was finally determined, it wasn’t a mysterious system bug or the work of a shadowy hacker syndicate. The truth was far more mundane — and embarrassing. Cubic, the contractor hired by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) to operate the fare collection system, had simply forgotten to pay an AT&T bill.
“Cubic not paying their bill, are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous,” Robert Powers, BART’s general manager, saidin an emotionally charged soliloquy at a public meeting in June with Cubic executives sitting in the room. “BART...
