Commuters returning to Muni after the holidays were frustrated to discover that their monthly passes through Clipper weren’t working Monday, in the latest debacle with the revamped transit card.
A separate Clipper malfunction prevented BART and Caltrain from collecting new fares that went into effect on New Year’s Day. Instead, riders on the two train systems paid last year’s lower rates.
They are the latest snags since an updated system — Clipper 2.0 — debuted last month after years of delay. And transit officials warn that the stress could last weeks.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees the Clipper system, said an outage began Monday afternoon and lasted about four hours, preventing customers from logging into the clippercard.com (opens in new tab) website. At the same time, customer service representatives were blocked from looking up accounts that had not yet migrated to the new system, according to John Goodwin, an MTC spokesperson.
But the disruption appears to have been more widespread. Complaints appeared Sunday on Reddit (opens in new tab) from users fuming that they were unable to access hundreds of dollars they had loaded onto their accounts. Some said they had repurchased monthly passes for the bus and train or were paying for each ride as they go.
The problems stem from the Dec. 10 transition to the next-generation Clipper system, Goodwin said. The new system was hailed for enabling passengers to pay for rides by tapping a credit card, or phone with the Clipper app, rather than relying on the plastic Clipper cards, at fare gates.
Goodwin said about 400,000 accounts out of 4.5 million Clipper accounts used in the last year have successfully migrated to the new system. He said Clipper’s figures show that 1.26 million accounts were used in October; almost 600,000 of those were unique mobile cards.
Kay Harnish-Ladd, a Noe Valley resident whose husband relies on Muni for visits to a senior center, said they’ve tried to get their accounts straightened out via Clipper’s customer service after receiving an alert about technical problems for credit card users.
“They recommended that we stop autoload and then reinstall it. But when we tried to do that, it wouldn’t let us restart autoload,” Harnish-Ladd said in an email. “Their next suggestion was that he get a new senior card and transfer the balance over to it and then set up autoload on the new card.”
Although her husband’s Clipper card issue has been resolved, her card remains in limbo, Harnish-Ladd said.
“It felt kind of scary to just be told, ‘Sorry, we know this doesn’t work. We don’t know when it will work,’” Harnish-Ladd said Tuesday. “‘You’ll just have to go out and buy a new card until we get it figured out.’ It didn’t communicate a lot of confidence.”
BART and Caltrain have the opportunity to recoup their losses tied to the glitch around the updated fares. Goodwin confirmed that BART and Caltrain notified the system contractor, Cubic, on Friday that customers were not being charged the higher 2026 fares. The issue was corrected late Saturday, and MTC and Cubic are calculating the lost fare revenue to reimburse both agencies.
According to its latest numbers (opens in new tab), BART recorded more than 230,000 paid trips from Jan. 1 to 3.
At last month’s meeting of the Clipper executive board, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Julie Kirschbaum described the impact of the card problems on riders.
“I went to the dentist, and the person I was talking to is a daily ferry rider. She had the bad luck of uploading her monthly transit money, which is almost $300, right when we were having this problem, and now she can’t access that $300 and is still having to pay for her commute,” Kirschbaum said.
MTC officials said the transition process will continue into February, with no firm timeline for full resolution. Goodwin encouraged affected customers to contact the Clipper customer service center and consult (opens in new tab) the site’s FAQ section.
“We appreciate customers’ patience,” Goodwin said. “This is a process that is going to continue for the next several weeks.”