(Trends Wide) — The largest transportation network in the United States on Thursday suspended the use of Twitter to post service alerts, saying that “the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves 15.3 million passengers in an 8,000-square-kilometer area surrounding New York City, Long Island, New York state and Connecticut, also said its access to Twitter through of its application programming interface has been inadvertently interrupted twice in the last two weeks.
“The MTA does not pay for technology platforms to post service information and has created redundant tools that provide real-time service alerts,” Shanifah Rieara, the MTA’s acting director of customer service, said in a statement. “Those include the MYmta and TrainTime apps, the MTA home page at MTA.info, email alerts and text messages,” she noted.
“Service alerts are also available on thousands of screens in stations, trains and buses,” Rieara said. “The MTA has stopped posting service information on Twitter, effective immediately, as the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed.”
The @MTA app will remain active and customers will still be able to tweet to MTA accounts, including @nyct_subway, and get responses, according to the MTA.
— Trends Wide’s Julian Cummings contributed to this report.