Tube data feed shut for being popular

Transport for London has been forced to temporarily close its much-hyped London Underground departure times data feed due to overwhelming interest in the service.

Application coders flooded the system after TfL tweaked its terms and conditions for using its datasets, allowing developers to access London's tube, bus and river information as of 15 June, without having to first gain permission from the organisation.

After the first week of making the data publicly available, the Greater London Authority's DataStore website received 10 million hits for the TfL feed from keen developers desperate to mash up the data for phone apps.

On 1 July the TfL feed was "temporarily suspended".

The GLA said it hoped to bring the service back online as quickly as possible, but admitted it "may take some days".

However, it's not provided any official update on its blog since that statement, and the service is still unavailable.

The Register has asked TfL to tell us when developers can expect to see the service back up and running, but at time of writing it hadn't gotten back to us with comment. ®