Tokyo Skytree elevator traps 20 people for six hours

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Tokyo Skytree in November 2025. One of its elevator came to a standstill on Sunday around 8:15 p.m. All of its passengers were rescued about six hours later, close to 2:00 a.m. on Monday. japantimes.co.jp

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Twenty people, including two children, were trapped in a Tokyo Skytree elevator for about six hours on Sunday night after the lift stopped roughly 30 metres above the ground. According to The Japan Times, the elevator stalled around 8:15 p.m. and the passengers were rescued close to 2:00 a.m. Monday; no injuries were reported. The Skytree operator closed the tower on Monday for a safety inspection and said it would refund admission fees to visitors who had reservations.

The rescue itself read like a manual for what “redundancy” looks like when a core system fails. Tokyo has four Skytree elevators—named Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter—and the stalled car was the Winter unit. Rescuers lowered the empty Autumn elevator to the same level as the stuck car, bridged the two side emergency doors with a stainless-steel plate, and had passengers cross a gap of about 1.5 metres while firefighters assisted. Even with multiple cars in the same shaft system, the fallback was not a second independent route to the ground; it was an improvised transfer that depended on another car being operable and controllable.

The wider operational problem is that modern “smart” building systems tend to concentrate risk. Elevators are tightly integrated with sensors, programmable logic controllers, access control, remote diagnostics and vendor maintenance contracts. When everything works, this reduces staffing and downtime. When something doesn’t—an error state that the system refuses to clear, a sensor that produces an out-of-range reading, a safety interlock that trips—the building’s operators often have limited authority to override, and the fastest path becomes a call chain: local staff to contracted maintenance to the manufacturer’s support. The Skytree operator said each elevator carries emergency supplies such as drinking water, portable toilets, blankets and flashlights, which is a tacit admission that “restore service quickly” is not always a realistic promise.

The incident also stranded about 1,200 people on the 350-metre observation deck when the Spring and Summer units were suspended for checks until around 9:35 p.m., leaving visitors waiting for capacity to return. That is the second-order effect of a single failure in vertical transport: it is not only a trapped car, but the building’s throughput collapsing into a queue. In tourist infrastructure, that queue becomes refunds, overtime, reputational damage—and a safety question about how long it takes to clear a high-altitude public space if the problem is not a stalled car but smoke, fire, or a power event.

Skytree has had similar elevator incidents before, in 2015 and 2017, though those were resolved within about 30 minutes, The Japan Times reports. This time, the tower’s solution was a steel plate between two immobilised cars.

At 8:15 p.m. an elevator stopped 30 metres above the ground; at 2:00 a.m. the passengers walked out sideways.