Oyster system suffers failure

London commuters were able to pass freely through ticket gates at tube stations this morning after the Oyster card ticketing system used by London Underground suffered a new failure.

Two weeks ago, several thousand commuters were left with useless Oyster cards after a system glitch wiped all cards used before 9.30am on Saturday 12 July.

The new problem was again blamed on a contractor.

A Transport for London (TfL) spokesperson apologised for the inconvenience and said: "We believe that this problem, like the last one resulted from incorrect data tables being sent out by our contractor, Transys."

"Cards are not being disabled and we will automatically refund any passengers who may be charged the maximum £4 fare as a result of not being able to touch in and out at the beginning and end of their journeys," the spokesperson continued.

TfL did not specify when it expected the problem to be fixed.

The news comes after a Dutch judge ruled that a method of cloning the cards, developed by researchers at Radboud University, Nijmegen, can be made public, despite the protestations of NXP, the company that developed the system.

UPDATE 1600BST: TfL has said that all systems are working correctly again and that no Oyster cards should have been corrupted, as in the case of the system problems two weeks ago.

www.tfl.gov.uk