PARIS: A computer glitch in a road signalling system caused train business dislocations in Poland, Italy and Asia, French rail mammoth Alstom said on Thursday.
The problem has been detected and is in the process of being fixed, a spokesperson for the company said, adding that it wasn’t a cyberattack.
The malfunctions have caused significant detainments and cancellations along train routes, road authorities in Poland and Italy said.
In Italy, road company TRENITALIA issued an alert saying that control system outage had caused major problems along the crucial Rome-Florence line.
Numerous trains faced detainments of over to two hours or have been cancelled because of problems to the centralised computer control system, Italian State Railway said.
The problem was fixed by noon with train business gradationally being restored and detainments shrinking, the company said. Alstom’s Italy branch said that the same problem affected road systems in Thailand and India.
In India there was some dislocation on a many road routes, but effects had returned to normal by autumn. Alstom owns a 20 per cent stake in Transmashholding, the Russian locomotives and rail outfit provider.
In Poland, government cybersecurity principal Janusz Cieszynski, said a platoon assigned with handling exigency situations will probe the malfunction.
Poland’s PKP PLK road company Director Miroslaw Skubiszynski said that the unforeseen outage took place at 0300GMT Thursday and affected 19 out of Poland’s 33 control centers, footling train business on some 820 kilometers of roads.
Because the reach of the outage is nearly civil, it’s clear that some of the trains won’t run at all moment, Skubiszynski told journalists.
