The toll unit of San Miguel Corp. said it has waived the toll fees of about 84,000 vehicles that were stuck in traffic due to the outage of the company’s toll collection system on Thursday, Nov. 17.
“SMC Infrastructure sincerely apologizes to all motorists affected by traffic jams along portions of the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX), Skyway, NAIAx and STAR Tollway this morning, resulting from a momentary network outage in our electronic toll collection system,” the company said in media statement.
The toll operator said it traced the source of the downtime to a cut in fiber optic network. “We are still determining the root cause of the damage, but there are indications that a major vehicular accident may have contributed to the situation,” it said.
To help ease traffic congestion, SMC said it deployed additional manpower to provide support for motorists.
“We also opened affected toll plazas and waived toll fees. All in all, this covers around 84,000 vehicles that passed through the expressways from 6am to 2pm, Thursday, November 17,” it said.
“This includes motorists whose ETC accounts were deducted upon entry; they will receive electronic refunds in their Autosweep accounts. While the system was restored around 9 am, we decided to keep barriers at toll plazas up, to enable all affected motorists to pass through for free.”
