NS PTC outage yesterday

[David Collins]

https://railfan.com/norfolk-southern-sn ... ol-outage/

As somebody put it on Facebook yesterday; a complete and total standstill. It stretched beyond PTC, the whole mainframe was down too.

[DaveO]

ns wasn't the only place with issues. may have been a full-on cyber attack yesterday.

[TSS]

ns wasn't the only place with issues. may have been a full-on cyber attack yesterday.

Yet they are claiming it wasn’t. I don’t want to accuse them of lying, but I still can’t fathom how it could be anything but a cyber attack. How can you design a mission critical system (systems!) so poorly that a failure can take down the entire company? I wonder the same thing about Amtrak’s PTC failure earlier in the year.

If it was a vendor failure or a design flaw, there would be PR platitudes to the effect of “we are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again….” Instead, silence.

[~Z~]

How can you design a mission critical system (systems!) so poorly that a failure can take down the entire company?

Lolz... it happens, time and time again. Minor things like a vendor making a change to a piece of network router hardware can bring down communication to all company devices. I've seen it happen, time and time again.

[DaveO]

was a programmer for ma bell many years ago.
1st line of defense was hope nobody tried