Hong Kong's morning commute for millions was thrown into chaos on Tuesday (Oct. 16) due to a signalling fault.

The trains were disrupted for six hours from around 5.30am to 11.45am before service slowly resumed.

Half-price fares

As a result, MTR Corporation will be cutting train fares by half for a day, reported South China Morning Post .

The day for the discount has not been announced yet.

MTR Corporation's Managing Director of Operations and Mainland Business Jacob Kam also apologised to commuters for the inconvenience caused when making the announcement on Tuesday.

Commuters remain unimpressed

Neither did the apology nor the measure seem to pacify commuters.

I pay the full ticket price, you (referring to Kam) come down and queue. #payyourf***********r

Thank you for your discount but no thanks. HK people no money meh? Why don't I pay you full price and you:

Throw away all the made-in-mainland stuff, change back to made in UK products. 

Sack all the useless MTR senior management. 

Don't let so many low quality mainlanders come down take the train, reduce the damage. 

This means we must punish the smugglers so hard till they bleed (a Cantonese expression). 

Next time if the MTR breaks down again, the entire senior management should go to the middle of the Central station to kowtow and apologise, until the train is back to normal.

If you don't know how, learn from the Japanese.

F**k y**r m****r, the discount uses our tax money, why don't you just kill one to appease 100, fire one of the senior management. (Angry emojis)

Half price for a day, then breakdown again on the day itself.

It's best if fares don't rise next year.

Breakdown due to transfer of large amounts of information

Tony Lee, MTR Corporation's top engineer, said on Wednesday (Oct. 17) that it was not the testing of a new signalling system that caused the breakdown.

But rather, it was due to "an uncontrolled transfer of large amounts of information between computers", according to another report by SCMP.

He said the transfer was done by the computers and that no one gave the computers an order:

"They were doing something we called ‘synchronisation’.

It occupied large amounts of computing resources and made the computers unstable. We believe this was related to [problems in] programmes and setting.

We have never seen this kind of data synchronisation before.

By 4.30pm on Tuesday, we had successfully switched back to the existing system.”

Kam said previously that investigations would take more than two months to complete.

Penalty not yet decided

According to Bloomberg, MTR has to pay a HK$1 million (S$175,400) fine to the Hong Kong government -- MTR's largest shareholder -- if there are delays of more than 31 minutes.

Hong Kong's Transport Secretary Frank Chan said on Tuesday the government would review the situation and decide if a heavier penalty should be imposed on MTR, reported The Straits Times.

For a 10-hour disruption on the Kwun Tong line last year -- also due to a signalling fault -- MTR paid a HK$2 million (S$352,000) penalty.

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Top image via Tom Corbett/Twitter