TfL urged to 'do better' after power cut disruption

Transport for London (TfL) has been accused of supplying a "disappointing" lack of information during major disruption to Tube and Overground services on Monday following a power failure.

Watchdog London TravelWatch (LTW) said TfL should do "much better" after its website crashed and its social media feeds were out of date as passengers struggled to make journeys.

The Elizabeth, Bakerloo, Jubilee and Northern lines were among those disrupted or suspended after a fault on National Grid's transmission network.

TfL apologised for the disruption. It said its power supply stopped without warning and it needed to ensure it was safely restarted.

The transport body said a short power cut in south-west London at about 14:30 BST led to knock-on problems across the network.

Services on the affected lines have since returned to normal, TfL said.

LTW said in a statement: "While incidents such as these are unpredictable, it was disappointing to see the lack of information and updates on TfL's own social media feeds...

"Increased traffic to the TfL website also saw the site crashing and becoming unresponsive.

"We accept that incidents like this can occur but do expect TfL to do much better when it comes to communicating with the millions of people who are reliant on their services.

"Directing all passengers to their website is not practical if the site then crashes."

A spokesperson added: "Passengers also need reassurance that public transport services will be more resilient in future to incidents such as this."

In response, TfL apologised to customers "who had any issues accessing our travel information".

It added: "We continue to look carefully at how we best notify customers about service issues in real time, this includes being able to use notifications in our TfL Go app to communicate with customers, and in future enabling more personalised notifications based on our customers' individual journeys."

The power cut also caused a fire at an electrical substation in the Cunningham Place and Aberdeen Place area of Maida Vale, a London Fire Brigade (LFB) spokesperson said.

Firefighters brought the flames under control, but three metres of high voltage cabling were destroyed, LFB said.

The National Grid has apologised for the disruption caused by the power failure.

A spokesperson said: "The fault was resolved within seconds and did not interrupt supply from our network, but a consequent voltage dip may have briefly affected power supplies on the low-voltage distribution network in the area."

TfL said it would work with National Grid and UK Power Networks to investigate the outage.

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