Transport for London has revealed why it decided not to use social media to warn passengers about a massive power cut on the Tube and Elizabeth line.
Six Tube lines and the “Lizzie” line – the country’s busiest train line – were brought to a standstill in central London on Monday afternoon.
An “accidental” fire at an electricity substation in Maida vale resulted in a temporary loss of power from National Grid to TfL.
Three Tube trains were stuck in tunnels for up to 40 minutes and it took almost six hours to restore service on the Bakerloo line.
TfL provided “live status” updates on its website about the power failure – but its website crashed on the same afternoon.
TfL did not post messages on its X/Twitter account, despite it being followed by 2.4m people – prompting criticism from London TravelWatch, the passenger watchdog, for not doing more to keep passengers informed.
London TravelWatch said: “While incidents such as these are unpredictable, it was disappointing to see the lack of information and updates on TfL’s own social media feeds, particularly as other train operators were keeping passengers updated.
“Increased traffic to the TfL website also saw the site crashing and becoming unresponsive.
“We accept that incidents like this can occur but do expect TfL to do much better when it comes to communicating with the millions of people who are reliant on their services.
“Directing all passengers to their website is not practical if the site then crashes, and people need to receive up-to-date information in order to continue their journeys with the least disruption.”
TfL said it used its own travel app, TfL Go, to provide updates.
It said it no longer used social media to communicate during live incidents “due to challenges with algorithms on those services delaying when messages are seen”.
This can often result in “non-chronological timelines” – meaning that passengers only receive information after the disruption has ended.
TfL is now looking to make improvements to TfL Go -which was recently upgraded to link with Oyster card accounts - to enable personalised notifications to be sent direct to users’ phones.
Emma Strain, TfL’s customer director, said: ““We continue to look carefully at how we best notify customers about service issues in real time, this includes being able to use notifications in our TfL Go app to communicate with customers, and in future enabling more personalised notifications based on our customers’ individual journeys.”
The London Fire Brigade said its initial assessment was that the fire was “accidental and caused by an electrical event involving high voltage cabling”.
