Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service

linuxwrangler writes "San Francisco Bay Area commuters awoke this morning to the news that BART, the major regional transit system which carries hundreds of thousands of daily riders, was entirely shut down due to a computer failure. Commuters stood stranded at stations and traffic backed up as residents took to the roads. The system has returned to service and BART says the outage resulted from a botched software upgrade."

Re:Strange times

[TWX]

Well, based on my own experience with bureaucracies, there is some existing rule that ensures that certain types of staff have certain days off unless there's an emergency, and a software update probably didn't previously count as an emergency.

From one standpoint, it makes sense, especially if those doing the work need technical support from a vendor. On the other hand, it probably makes more sense to have a QA lab set up if one is going to operate this way, so that one can test a rollout in advance, hopefully forestalling such problems going live.

Re:BART

[MrEricSir]

The Bart-SFO extension was a matter of politics, you can't blame the people who run Bart for that. You also can't blame the initial designers for not building the OAK extension, since OAK was a much smaller airport in those days (and had very few passenger flights.)

The train design was done by an aerospace company with absolutely no rail experience, which explains Bart's quirky design elements. But you can't blame Bart current management for construction contracts awarded in the 1960's.