Single Computer Switch Failure Triggered Saturday's BART Shut Down
OAKLAND (CBS SF) -- The failure of a switch within BART's complex computer system triggered Saturday's three-hour shut down of the massive transit system, stranding thousands of commuters, officials announced Monday.
BART Spokeswoman Alicia Trost said the failure was not related to crews working overnight on BART's uninterruptible power supply in Oakland, as was originally believed.
"The failure was software related at one switch that is part of a complex computer network," she said in a release. " As a result, trains were not dispatched between 6 am and 9 am Saturday morning. There was no maintenance being done on the system at the time of the failure. Therefore, we know the cause wasn't contributed to work being done overnight."
BART is launching an internal forensic investigation trying to determine what caused a system wide shutdown Saturday.
At 2:45 a.m. Saturday, BART had a computer system failure affecting the system's traction power supply system and train control routing system. For three hours of the morning commute from 6 to 9 a.m., trains were stopped in their tracks. Trost said the outage forced the agency to reset computers at more than 100 locations.
"Since that moment we've had no problems with train service, no failure points," Trost said.
Cisco Systems, which operates BART's computer system that failed, is now conducting an investigation. BART anticipates it will have a better understanding of the root cause in the coming days.
"Now we're waiting for Cisco to tell us what happened with that switch, why did it fail, why were the layers of redundancy that we have in place not working," Trost said.
Roughly 150,000 people ride BART on Saturdays, compared to nearly 400,000 people on most weekdays.
BART says this is the most significant outage the transit agency has experienced in 15 years.
Trost says when the system fails it does so safely, trains were not moving for three hours but the system shut down as it's designed to.
Trost said the BART staff was waiting for failure analysis results from Cisco to understand the exact cause of the failure.
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