Transport for London has revealed that it no longer uses social media as a way of communicating to passengers, after power cuts caused rail services to be cancelled and many central London stations closed.

The problems on Monday afternoon disrupted parts of the Underground and Overground, as well as the Elizabeth Line.

The power failures have been attributed to a National Grid fault, but TfL was criticised by passenger watchdog London TravelWatch for not making the situation clear to its passengers. They were advised to use the TfL website, but this also then crashed.

TfL, which had apologised for the closures and cancellations, has now revealed it has stopped using social media channels because messages do not appear promptly and in chronological order, so that information about disruptions is sometimes posted when in fact normal services have been restored.

Last night, TfL’s customer director Emma Strain said: ‘I apologise to our customers who were affected by the power issue caused by a failure of supply from National Grid on the network yesterday and who had any issues accessing our travel information. All of the rail services that were affected were restored yesterday and have been operating as normal today.

‘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.’

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