Toronto Subway Faces 25-Minute TTC Shutdown on Two Lines
The toronto subway service on lines 2 and 4 stopped for 25 minutes Thursday morning after software glitches forced the TTC to suspend trains. TTC CEO Mandeep Lali said the failure came from software, not hardware, and the agency later identified the problem in its digital system.
That same service ran into another disruption Friday morning, when a 40-minute rush-hour outage hit the line between Woodbine and Broadview stations. For riders, the issue was not just the length of each interruption but the fact that two separate morning failures hit the network in consecutive days.
Mandeep Lali on the software failure
Lali said Thursday evening that the problem was “It was a gremlin within the software, not the hardware” and added, “The teams have identified the gremlin that caused the failure this morning.” Adrian Grundy later said, “No two delays are the same,” when asked about the recent disruptions.
Those comments drew a line between the morning shutdown and earlier TTC problems. The agency previously shut down a long stretch of Line 2 from Ossington to Woodbine last month because the Bloor-Danforth line had its second oil spill in a week, and its subway stations have also dealt with a widespread elevator outage.
Friday Morning on Line 2
The Friday outage stretched between Woodbine and Broadview during the rush hour and lasted 40 minutes. It followed a streetcar derailment in March that delayed five routes by up to 15 minutes, adding another incident to a list of recent service problems.
Brad Bradford said Toronto cannot “can’t afford” to let the world down with shoddy transit during the tournament. The TTC expects to see an additional two million rides during the FIFA World Cup period, which begins in June.
TTC and Metrolinx Next Week
Grundy said he and Metrolinx will give a presentation next week to the Toronto Region Board of Trade on the work being done to prepare. For riders, the practical takeaway is simple: the TTC has already had two morning disruptions on consecutive days, and it is treating the failures as software-related rather than a hardware problem.
