ST. LOUIS — Annette Nowakowski relies on Metro Transit's Call-A-Ride service to get around St. Louis. Driving herself isn't an option because she's blind.
She was looking forward to attending FestAbility, an event in Forest Park celebrating disabilities. The trip had been penciled in three days in advance, with her ride scheduled to pick her up at 7:16 a.m. Saturday.
By 8:30 a.m., her ride still hadn't arrived.
"I just gave up and figured, 'Well, I guess I'm not going anywhere today,'" Nowakowski said.
She tried calling the service again to see what had happened. The operator never answered.
"I couldn't get through. I got this message that kept saying 'All the lines are busy. Please hold for the next available operator,'" Nowakowski said.
She wasn't the only one experiencing this. Riders with disabilities have been left stranded by the Call-A-Ride service as Metro Transit's phone systems are still reeling after a Monday cyberattack.
The outage has sparked calls from riders like Nowakowski, who want better solutions in place when outages happen, like relying on rideshare services.
The same thing happened to Nowakowski earlier this week when the cyberattack hit. While she knows things are out of Call-A-Ride's control, she said she wants an alternative.
"(They need to) try to use Uber or Lyft or some on-demand service. And subsidize it in some way," Nowakowski said. "We want the public to know what's going on, and we really need public support to help us out with this problem."
Metro Transit released a statement from Bi-State Development President and CEO Taulby Roach on Monday to report a cyber attack that froze ride systems. It reads, in part:
Metro Transit was the target of a cyber attack. To defend from such a malicious action, we froze our systems and immediately got to work to deny access to critical information and protect our systems.
The good news is that we believe the breach is contained and we were able to continue to safely run our transit services yesterday.
Normal transit service for MetroLink and MetroBus will continue today, however, because our scheduling software is still being recovered for Metro Call-A-Ride, we are only able to provide life critical appointments today to dialysis treatments.
Our IT teams have been working through the night to restore the service, and we are hopeful to be fully functional later this morning.
The transit phone system and Call-A-Ride scheduling system are still down as well as emails.
We will do everything we can to get back to full functionality for our paratransit service, but for now, we ask for the patience and understanding of our impacted customers.
Please accept our apologies for this disruption.
Later that day, the service said phones were slowly coming back as well as the reservation systems for Call-A-Ride, and Metro Transit would inform customers of any changes.
Saturday, the transit service released another statement saying the cyberattack was continuing to impact phone systems related to Call-A-Ride.
The statement reads:
The cyber incident experienced by Metro Transit earlier this week continues to impact computer networks related to Metro Call-A-Ride and phone systems. Due to these ongoing issues Call-A-Ride is unable to provide any transportation this weekend (Oct. 7-8).
We apologize for the inconvenience this causes our customers. At this time, we are unable to contact customers who reserved trips for today and tomorrow.
The scheduling system used to reserve future Call-A-Ride trips is not currently accessible. We will keep our customers updated through the media and social media as the network systems are restored.
MetroLink and MetroBus will be operating on normal weekend schedules today and tomorrow. However, Ticket Vending Machines will only accept cash until further notice.
The Bi-State Development IT team detected the additional Cyber security event early this morning and we are working with our computer security partners to identify next steps toward restoration. We will update our customers through the media and through social media as changes warrant." - Patti Beck Bi-State Development Senior Director of Media & Public Relations.
On Sunday, Metro Transit provided an update saying services for customers who had made reservations before Sunday would resume at 12:30 p.m. through the end of the day.
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