Elon Musk’s Twitter Payment Plan Puts NYC Subway Alerts at Risk

Service alerts on Twitter for New York City transit riders could end if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority doesn’t shell out half a million dollars a year to the platform owned by Elon Musk.

The MTA’s real-time service alerts on Twitter for subway, train and bus riders went dark this past weekend due to an issue with the platform’s application programming interface, or API, an infrastructure tool that allows for multiple computer programs to work together. The MTA wasn’t able to post service alerts to its millions of customers who rely on it. The issue has since been resolved, and the alerts are back in operation.