7 Subway Lines Halted In Heat Wave; MTA Blames Computer Failure

NEW YORK — A computer failure halted seven subway lines during the Friday evening commute as a heat wave gripped New York City, the MTA said. The 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 42nd Street shuttle lines were suspended for nearly 90 minutes because of a failure in the computer system that powers subway signals, MTA Communications Director Tim Minton said.

The “total stoppage” started at 5:50 p.m. and ran for more than an hour before service started to come back to life at 7:16 p.m., Minton said. The root cause of the failure is under investigation, he said.

“For safety reasons trains were required to maintain their positions at the time of the interruption, and some of those trains were in between stations when that occurred,” Minton said in a statement. “We worked to progressively move trains into stations while, simultaneously, technicians were successfully able to reboot the servers.”

The MTA warned of extensive delays on the lines after service resumed.

The halt came as dangerously high temperatures struck the city, reportedly baking subway platforms and the riders on them.

The MTA believes no trains lost power or air conditioning during the stoppage, Minton said. But the journalist Alberto Riva said he was stranded on a 5 train without AC for at least an hour. Riders were upbeat and sharing phones with each other despite the dire circumstances, he said.

"@MTA announcements notably sparse and unclear. This is awful and unbecoming of a serious global city," Riva said on Twitter.

The NYPD dispatched extra cops to packed subway stations to handle overcrowding, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. NYC Transit advised commuters to stick to lettered lines and local buses during the outage.

City officials slammed the MTA for the rush-hour mess, which came ahead of possible 110-degree heat on Saturday and Sunday.

"This kind of meltdown during a heat wave is UNACCEPTABLE," de Blasio said on Twitter. "The MTA owes every single New Yorker an explanation for this."

"I will be expecting a report from the MTA on how this happened during a heat wave when people are encouraged to use mass transit," Johnson tweeted.