MTA Subway Outage That Stranded 100s 'Unacceptable,' Hochul Says

NEW YORK CITY — An "unprecedented system breakdown" of MTA subway system left half the city without service and hundreds of straphangers stranded between stations Sunday night, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

"Last night was unacceptable," Hochul said Monday morning. "If you're one of those riders or people relying on safe transport, the system failed you. The MTA is the lifeblood of the city, and a disruption of this magnitude can be catastrophic."

Hochul vowed to immediately start a review to root out what happened.

The subway snarl followed a "momentary outage" in Con Edison's power system, Hochul said. She said New York City experienced a voltage dip about 8:25 p.m. after losing a feeder.

Two power plants and generators went offline, prompting Con Edison to go to a backup system, she said.

"When it tried to go back to normal, there was a surge, an unprecedented surge that resulted in the subway losing signalization and communication ability and it lost that between its command center and the trains throughout the system," she said.

The subway's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and L lines all experienced outages, Hochul said. She said 83 trains were affected, with five of those being stuck between stations.

About 550 straphangers were stuck on those stranded trains, she said.

"This ended up leading to evacuations in the tunnels and two of those evacuations were orderly and directed by the emergency personnel," she said. "In two other cases, the experience was what was known as self-evacuation, where riders decided to leave on their own. We never, ever want riders to do that. It is dangerous and it caused a delay in the restoration of power."

Train service was fully restored at 1:30 a.m., Hochul said.