The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has identified the root cause of the intermittent transmission issue affecting the Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) System for buses. Following a system reset at 8pm on 21 January, our engineers and ETA system contractor discovered a memory cache build-up in the on-board systems of some buses. This disrupted data transmissions between on-board bus systems and the central ETA processing servers, leading to missing bus arrival timings. About 50% of the bus fleet across all bus operators were affected.

2.        LTA has been working with the ETA system contractor to reconfigure the system and clear the cache on all the affected buses. This involves a physical servicing of the on-board bus devices by the technicians. Given the scale of work, we expect this process to take approximately four days.

3.        LTA will switch the ETA system back on from 23 January, at the start of passenger service, to conduct testing and stabilise the operations. Bus arrival timings will not be fully available or accurate during this period as we progressively restore system performance and complete thorough testing. More than 60% of the bus arrival timings will be available for commuters from 23 January at touchpoints such as the electronic passenger information displays at bus stops and interchanges, apps like MyTransport.SG and third-party apps such as CityMapper and Google Maps. For the remaining bus services, commuters will still observe missing arrival timings or timings with longer headways, but these should gradually become less common as we progressively restore the system.

4.        Bus services continue to operate as scheduled, and LTA will continue to closely monitor the ETA system throughout this period.

5.        We thank commuters for their patience while we worked to resolve the issue and apologise for the inconvenience caused.