TOKYO—Saying the outdated system needed to be upgraded or replaced to avoid similar problems going forward, millions of inconvenienced Japanese warp commuters expressed frustration Thursday following a Tokyo portal outage that caused delays of up to eight seconds. “I’m going to miss my transfer to the Green Portal—I was supposed to be in Osaka 2.2 seconds ago!” IT contractor Takashi Ikeda said, echoing other commuters who complained that the current portal system was over 30 years old and had become increasingly unreliable, at times incorrectly recombining two or more passengers. “It’s bad enough when the quantum matter compression runs 50 nanoseconds behind schedule, but this is totally unacceptable.” Although commuters were able to attempt alternate routes by taking wormholes back to before they had been delayed, many travelers told reporters that the inconvenience of having to kill and dispose of their past selves made the work-around unsustainable.

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