Clipper machines throughout the Bay Area are down Monday morning, snaring commuters after a planned outage that was supposed to end on Sunday. According to BART spokesperson Chris Filippi, riders aren’t able to use the machines to add funds to their cards and can’t use the machines to pay for parking, either.
“People can use Tap and Ride (contactless bank card/Apple Pay/Google Pay) to pay for BART or add funds to a digital Clipper card via Apple Pay or Google Pay,” Filippi wrote in an email to SFGATE. “Those who park can use the BART app or pay for parking online.”
He also said the outage has not affected train service so far.
John Goodwin, assistant director of communications at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said the issue is related to the migration from the legacy Clipper system to the next-generation Clipper system. “This interruption affected (some) ticket vending machines and other Clipper hardware devices in both the BART and Muni systems,” Goodin wrote in an email to SFGATE. “Interestingly, this problem did not affect all Clipper equipment in either the BART system or the Muni system.”
Goodwin said the Clipper contractor, Cubic Transportation Systems, is currently bringing the affected machines back online in phases.
Clipper had a planned outage Sunday that was supposed to last from midnight to 7 a.m., affecting the Clipper mobile app, website and machines.
Redditors expressed doubts about this timeline.
“I give it less than 50% odds of working. Expect a multi day outage. The company handling this has f—ked it up in just about every way possible, so expectations should be low,” wrote one user.
Clipper has experienced a host of issues in recent months, including an outage that took down machines for nearly 30 hours in May. At a recent Clipper Executive Board meeting, it was revealed that the reason for that outage stemmed from an unpaid bill.