German rail company Deutsche Bahn resumed train services after a tech outage halted all trains nationwide for a little more than two hours late Tuesday night.
The technical meltdown was due to a fault in the so-called Global System for Mobile Communication for Railways (GSM-R) system that is used to link train operators and control centers on the railway network. Shortly after midnight, the situation was stabilized, but disruptions in the network were expected into Wednesday morning.
“A disruption of this kind has never occurred before due to the high security measures in railway operations,” Deutsche Bahn said in a statement on Wednesday.
Regional and suburban rail operators run by Deutsche Bahn also said on X that services were gradually restarting, but warned that major delays and cancellations were likely to persist into Wednesday morning.
Passengers stranded
Trains were held at stations and thousands of passengers were stranded nationwide during the duration of the outage, which lasted nearly 2 1/2 hours.
Berlin’s public transport authorities said that municipal, regional and long-distance trains run by Deutsche Bahn were impacted by the outage. Deutsche Bahn has developed a reputation for being unreliable, and passengers have come to expect long delays.
The rail company apologized to passengers for the situation and issued taxi and hotel vouchers to people affected.
No evidence of sabotage
Philipp Nagl, head of Deutsche Bahn’s railway infrastructure subsidiary DB InfraGO, said Wednesday that his team will “meticulously analyze the circumstances” to ensure a similar incident does not occur in the future.
Nagl said a “fault arose during maintenance work on a central component,” which then failed. That triggered a mandatory procedure that calls for passenger trains to be held at stations and freight trains to be parked.
Deutsche Bahn said that there was an automatic redundancy system for communications that would spring into action during a glitch, but IT specialists wanted to first pinpoint the cause of the outage and rule out a cyberattack.
Security sources told Reuters news agency said there was no evidence of sabotage.
German Federal Transportation Minister Patrick Schnieder has demanded a full investigation by the state-owned rail operator.
According to DB InfraGO, Germany has Europe’s largest rail network totaling some 33,400 kilometers (20,750 miles) in length, with 5,400 train stations and used by an average 50,000 trains per day.
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko, Jenipher Camino Gonzalez
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