Service alerts for the New York City subway, commuter trains and buses have been reinstated Twitter on Thursday, a week after transit officials refused to pay to provide the information.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost access last week to Twitter’s application programming interface to send automated alerts about service changes and emergencies. The MTA decided on Thursday to stop publishing service alerts to Twitter, saying it opposes the platform’s recent decision to start charging for access to its programming interface.
On one side of the face, Twitter said that this week it restored free access of the interface for verified government and “publicly owned” services so they can tweet alerts.
“Twitter got the message and reversed its plan to charge the MTA more than half a million dollars annually for these alerts, so now no transit agency has to pay,” a prepared statement read. from Shanifah Rieara, the acting chief customer officer of the MTA.
The nation’s largest transportation network began providing service alerts on its Twitter accounts during Thursday night’s commute.
The MTA also said last week it was concerned about technical problems that led to two recent outages of its Twitter alerts service. The authority said on Thursday that it had received written assurances from Twitter that the trustworthiness of the platform was guaranteed.
An email seeking comment was sent to Twitter’s communications office.
The outage of the service alert comes as many institutional Twitter users grapple with changes made by Elon Musk in an effort to make the service more profitable.