Road · 2026-10-21
Fourteen trains stopped at 7:04. The line was back before eight
A fault at the Thu Duc 220kV substation stopped 14 services on the Ben Thanh–Suoi Tien metro on 17 October. Power was back at 7:35. Full service returned at 7:57.
17 October 2026. Full service restored at 7:57.
If you ride Line 1 into the city, the morning of 17 October is the one to remember, and then to file away. At 7:04 the Thu Duc 220kV substation lost power, and the Ben Thanh–Suoi Tien line went with it. HURC1, the operator, told both Dân trí and VnExpress that 14 train journeys were affected. Trains that were already moving were taken to the nearest station so people could get off and wait. A passenger who had boarded at Suoi Tien for Tan Cang told Dân trí the doors had to be opened by hand, because her train had barely left the platform.
The two papers agree on the restart and split the clock in a useful way. Nguyễn Văn Bảy, deputy director of Power Transmission Company 4, told VnExpress the technical fault was fixed and power was back at 7:35, after 31 minutes, with the precise cause still under investigation. HURC1 told both papers that the trains themselves were running normally again at 7:57. Dân trí calls that nearly an hour. VnExpress counts 53 minutes from the first loss of power. HURC1 also said this was the first time the line had stopped because the national transmission grid failed. Earlier pauses, including about four minutes on 7 October after lightning near Tan Cang station, came from the line’s own safety system.
The line those trains use is the city’s first metro, in commercial service since December 2024. VnExpress describes it as nearly 20 kilometres, with three underground stations and 11 elevated ones, and 17 trains of three cars each. The same report says the first year carried about 19 million passengers, around 52,000 a day, rising to about 70,000 a day by March 2026. The photograph is a Line 1 train at Van Thanh station. It is not a picture of the 17 October stop.
