It was a very short run.

Just three days after Metro reinstated automatic door-opening on the Red Line, the rollout has already been paused, WMATA officials say. In June, Metro announced that automatic door-opening would be activated on July 7. On July 9, Metro had to switch all doors back to manual mode due to glitches, according to Metro spokesperson Dan Stessel.

The rollout was part of a planned return to automatic door-opening across the entire Metro system. Train operators have manually opened and closed train doors for about a decade, since WMATA moved away from its Automatic Train Operation system (or ATO) following the deadly Fort Totten crash. Metro has been testing automatic door-opening since March, and had planned to enable the feature on the Red Line this month.

But pretty much as soon as the automatic doors were in use along the entire line, problems cropped up. In a few isolated cases, Stessel says, the doors weren’t just automatically opening—they were automatically closing, too. That’s not supposed to happen. While Metro used to have automatically-opening doors across the system, it has always allowed train operators to manually close the doors when they deem enough time has elapsed to let passengers onto the train.

“While automatic door closing is a feature of the system, it is not one that we want active,” Stessel tells DCist via email. “The number of reports – about six – is small relative to the thousands of door openings that occur each day on the Red Line. Despite this, we have put door operations in manual mode to allow engineers to look into the issue.”

Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld addressed the issue at a WMATA board meeting on Thursday morning. He said it’s still unclear when the agency will re-enable automatic doors.

“We’ll come back as soon as we can,” Wiedefeld said. “If it’s a relatively small software issue then we can fix it very quick. If it’s something we have to engineer we would obviously…it’s just too soon to give you a date.”

Glitches have forced Metro to turn off automatic doors before. The feature was first disabled in 2008 after doors started opening automatically on the wrong side of the platform. Then the Fort Totten accident happened in 2009, and the agency switched off all automation on trains. (Train operators have occasionally made the same mistakes as those old automatic doors, opening doors on the wrong side of the platform in several instances.)

The move back to automatic doors was assumed at one time to be a precursor to a return to ATO, but the agency has since said returning to entirely automatic operation is not a current priority. Metro has made promises that it would return to ATO several times, but so far has not done so.

Jordan Pascale contributed reporting.