System outage briefly halts Norfolk Southern train operations

Eastern U.S. Class I railroad Norfolk Southern over the weekend experienced its second system outage in two months.

NS said it believes the latest outage was related to a vendor product defect. The outage was not related to a cybersecurity incident or the system outage that occurred on Aug. 28, according to the railroad.

The outage, which occurred Friday evening at NS’ data center, was resolved safely and successfully at 1:30 a.m. ET on Saturday, NS said in a Saturday update. The outage had impacted rail operations, including NS’ dispatching system, train movements and functionality of its terminal operating system. Because of the outage, operations were halted until NS was able to resolve the issue.

After NS resolved the issue, all systems became functional and trains started running again. However, NS’ marketing team will be providing updates to affected customers as the outage impact could “last at least a couple of weeks as we work to mitigate traffic congestion caused by the outage.”

NS (NYSE: NSC) also said it is working on examining the root cause of the incident and that it is undertaking a total review of the resiliency of its data center and network technology to prevent future outages.

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