Service alerts for the New York City subway, commuter trains and buses were back on Twitter on Thursday, a week after transit officials refused to pay to provide the information.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost access to Twitter’s API last week to send out automated notifications about service changes and emergencies. That was decided by the MTA last Thursday stop posting service alerts told Twitter and said it rejects the platform’s recent decision to charge for access to its API.
In an about-face, Twitter said this week it had restored free access to the interface for verified government and “public” services so they can tweet alerts.
“Twitter caught the news and reversed its plan to bill the MTA more than half a million dollars a year for these warnings, so now no transit company has to pay,” read a prepared statement from Shanifah Rieara, the Acting Chief Customer Officer of MTA.
The country’s largest transport network began providing service alerts on its Twitter accounts in time for Thursday night’s commute.
The MTA also said last week it was concerned about technical issues that led to two recent outages of its Twitter notification service. The authority announced on Thursday that it had received written assurances from Twitter that the reliability of the platform was guaranteed.
An email was sent to Twitter’s communications office requesting comment.
The service warning hiatus comes as many institutional Twitter users address changes Elon Musk has made to make the service viable.
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