Deutsche Bahn GSM-R Outage: Germany's Entire Rail Network Went Dark
Late Tuesday, Germany's national rail network stopped. Every Deutsche Bahn train across the country stopped abruptly wherever it was, going nowhere. The culprit - a failure in GSM-R, the Global System for Mobile Communications for Railways. It's the backbone of how train drivers talk to traffic control centers. When it goes down, trains don't move. Not because there's a safety threat in the conventional sense, but because no communication means no authorization to move, and rail safety protocols are unambiguous about that. You sit and wait.
https://thecybersecguru.com/news/deutsche-bahn-gsm-r-outage-germany-rail-network/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Normally this news would be huge, but since it's DB it's nothing out of the ordinary.
Yeah I am still trying to understand how a radio transmission network can have a countrywide outage...
So the safety protocol kicked in...
I'm still with you though, as how did they not have independent backup lines, or a decentralized core? (Money I'm sure, but that seems worth it.)
I work in IT and struggle to understand how to even design it that bad.
SO many questions.