ATLANTA — Norfolk Southern operations were disrupted by an outage at its data center on Friday night, the railroad reports, the second time in little more than a month that technical issues have affected rail operations.
The railroad said in a statement that the issue, which affected dispatching, train movements, and its terminal operating system, was resolved at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 30, but that that it will take “a couple of weeks” to mitigate traffic congestion caused by the outage.
NS said it has found no indication that the issue was related to a cybersecurity incident, or to an outage on Aug. 28 that also affected the railroad’s technology systems [see “‘Software defect’ caused system outage …,” Trains News Wire, Sept. 1, 2023]. The railroad said it is continuing to investigate the cause of the outage but believes “that it relates to a vendor product defect.” The company also said it has begun “a total review of the resiliency of its data center and network technology to prevent future outages.”
Probably got software from China. Works well the first time you use it, then turns into crap and falls apart.
Concur with Carleton; I’ve not been convinced that a system dispatching center is a safe and sound concept. Redundancy may be more expensive but necessary for protection and responsiveness. The former Southern Railway had a system operations center organized by a retired USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) officer. It monitored and coordinated operations. Dispatchers, who “physically knew” their territory, dispatched the trains from the various division offices. It worked pretty well.
With the construction of the new Norfolk Southern headquarters in Atlanta, ‘the ship had sailed’ for relocation to the former headquarters of Southern Railway in Washington, DC.
A missed opportunity was relocating the main headquarters to Chattanooga, the major alternative to Atlanta as Norfolk Southern’s railway hub.
As an afficionado of architecture, my observation is the tallest building in Chattanooga could have been built to house the new headquarters and be the city’s first skyscraper like the L&C Tower for Nashville built in 1957. And also be a stately structure at that! 🙂
Not related to cyber attacks??? Why is it only happening to NS? Asking for a friend!
How can a 5-7 hour outage cause several weeks worth of delays?
+Trains stranded in out of the way places. Then not enough crews to grab the stranded trains.
So it wasn’t the computer outage BUT AGAIN the results of laying off trained crews to satisfy PSR aims in the past. If they had the crews they have “said” they are hiring then this shouldn’t have been a two week problem. And this is the same problem the other roads are having as well.
Its is time the Government set a deadline for Railroads to have adequate crewing and a way for the STB, FRA or USDOT to hold them responsible for monetarily for delays when they don’t and problems happen. (Fines that are stiff enough to make a difference and can’t be passed on to the consumer… the only thing that the railroads managements seem to understand because it hurts their personal pocketbooks.!)
A janitor at the dispatch center probably pulled a plug from the wall to vacuum and forgot to plug it back in….lol (just kidding of course but some of these excuses are about that simple…)
As a future, interstellar engineer once said, “The more you complicate the plumbing the easier it is to back up the drain.”
This seems to have become a bad habit.
Dr. Güntürk Üstün
Isn’t a “vendor product defect” like blaming the horse for defective glue?