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.”
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