Traffic headaches hit drivers across Corpus Christi Wednesday morning after dozens of intersections suddenly switched into flashing red mode overnight.
City officials say more than 90 traffic signals malfunctioned, forcing drivers to treat intersections like four-way stops during the morning commute.
Most signals have since been restored, but the scale of the outage shows just how widespread the issue was.
According to city leaders, the problem began while most residents were asleep.
Renee Couture, Assistant Director of Public Works, said crews quickly realized how large the issue had become.
“Overnight, we started getting alerts that some of our intersections are going into flash and by this morning we had determined around 91 intersections were in flash.”
Public Works teams were deployed across Corpus Christi as technicians worked to fix signals intersection by intersection.
“Within hours we had our teams widespread and by 1 p.m. we had most of the issues already resolved.”
Officials say the city’s traffic signal system is typically monitored through a centralized network, allowing quick detection of problems.
“Most of the time, if the signals start to malfunction, we know within minutes that there’s an issue and we’re able to determine what that issue is.”
But this situation required a more hands-on approach.
“In this case, it required our technicians going directly to the intersection to resolve the problems.”
While crews prioritized high-traffic intersections, officials say the biggest concern quickly became driver behavior.
City leaders are reminding drivers that flashing red lights should always be treated like a stop sign: come to a complete stop, the first to arrive goes first, and if vehicles arrive at the same time, yield to the right.
The cause of the widespread malfunction is still under investigation. Couture says outages of this scale are unusual and typically tied to severe weather not this case.
“We figured it’s probably tied to some minor network issue… we’re narrowing down what the actual issue was.”
And despite the timing on April 1st, officials made one thing clear:
“This was not related to any type of April Fools joke or hacking of the system.”
City officials say they are continuing to investigate the exact cause, but emphasize the system is designed to detect issues quickly and respond just as fast.
For now, drivers are urged to stay alert and remember the rules of the road anytime signals are not functioning properly.