Internet connectivity issues affect CN’s customer service portal

CN confirmed that it is experiencing an internet connectivity issue as of Tuesday afternoon that’s affecting the Canadian railway’s customer service portal.

Passenger rail service via GO trains and VIA trains in and out of Union Station in Toronto, as well as CN’s customer service portal have all been impacted as they all require an internet connection to CN’s servers, the railway said Tuesday afternoon. But CN trains, Montreal’s EXO commuter rail service and Amtrak trains are operating, CN (NYSE: CNI) said.

“CN apologizes for the issue. We are working to get all services up and running safely and efficiently,” CN said in its statement to FreightWaves. While there is no indication of a cybersecurity issue, the cause of the outage is under investigation, CN continued. The railway didn’t specify when the internet connectivity issue started or whether cargo traffic was affected.

The issue comes after CN’s U.S. peer, eastern U.S. Class I railroad Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC), experienced a brief system outage last Friday evening and into early Saturday morning that impacted rail operations, including NS’ dispatching system, train movements and functionality of its terminal operating system. NS said it believed the outage — the second in two months — was related to a vendor product defect and was not a cybersecurity incident. NS resolved the issue but warned customers that delays might result from the short-lived outage.

NS attributed the first system outage in late August to a software defect.

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