Over the weekend, the City of Hamilton claimed it had restored real-time public transit data.
The statement was mostly true. A portion of the open data needed to broadcast real-time data was restored on Saturday.
However, the City failed to upload the GTFS static file needed for applications to make sense of the real-time data.
It’s like the City opened a restaurant and forgot to turn on the lights.
The City of Hamilton failed to upload the static GTFS file needed for the restoration of real-time data.
On Tuesday, TPR went to pull the real-time data and realized the required static file was unavailable.
The City also removed the temporary GTFS static file location, which provides bus schedule information in machine-readable format, over the weekend.
Ongoing Information Technology Failures
The City of Hamilton is struggling to recover from a devastating cybersecurity failure in February.
Nearly all City computer systems were compromised due to a lack of security protocols. The City lacked separation between systems and applications, and did not properly tier user privileges within its systems.
The City has not explained how the failure occurred.
Computers onboard HSR buses were effected, with real-time data feeds knocked out, transit control taken offline, and on-board bus stop announcement computers knocked out for months.
The City does not have a timeline for restoring all of its computer systems, only saying the recovery could take years.
Production Details v. 1.0.0 Published: July 17, 2024 Last updated: July 17, 2024 Author: Joey Coleman Update Record v. 1.0.0 original version