The Staten Island Ferry returned to a normal schedule Thursday and will run boats every 15 minutes during rush hour starting at 5 p.m., the city announced.

According to the city, service was suspended overnight from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. due to an influx of ferry workers calling out. The Staten Island Ferry service resumed running hourly at 6 a.m. Thursday.

The ferry was running hourly instead of every 15 minutes Wednesday evening. 

The mayor on Wednesday initially blamed a national worker shortage for the reduced service, but also alleged ferry workers were not showing up to work.

“We are saying to the workers who did not come in today: If you are not sick, New Yorkers need you to come to work,” Adams said in the statement. In recent weeks, the Department of Transportation blamed COVID-19 cases for staff shortages and service reductions, but the mayor did not say whether that was a cause of Wednesday's disruptions.

Later Wednesday, at the terminal, when asked if workers were staging a sick-out, Adams said he wasn't sure.

The union, the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association, said the worker shortage “is completely due to severely overworked and understaffed crews.”

Roland Rexha, the secretary-treasurer of MEBA and a former Staten Island Ferry worker, criticized the city's “refusal to offer a contract that reflects the highly-skilled and essential work of the ferry officers and mariners.” Ferry employees have been working for more than a decade under an old contract, and negotiating for a new one.

“We have continued to operate service under the most stressful and painful of circumstances while our crew continues to feel the tremendous financial pain and workload stress of the pandemic and its aftermath,” Rexha said in a statement. “The union has no knowledge of any deliberate disruptions of service nor would we endorse any action to slow down this essential service for our beloved Staten Islanders.”

Although Adams claims this is a problem that he inherited when becoming mayor, some elected officials said the staffing issue should have been a greater priority. 

“While the Mayor's office emphasized they are working as quickly as possible to address this dispute, reductions in service have become all the more frequent and should have been made a top priority during the first few months of this administration when I and other Staten Island officials highlighted it,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said in a statement Thursday. 

In January, Malliotakis, who is a member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, sent Adams a letter expressing her concerns “regarding ongoing labor issues within the Staten Island Ferry system.”