Control room network failure crashes Dutch rail system

The failure of a small form factor pluggable transceiver brought the railway system in the Netherlands to a standstill on 4 June.

The node outage, which occurred at about 5pm in a control room at Amsterdam Centraal station, crashed the control and safety network in the capital region for 15 hours.

About 750 trains were cancelled and control of the network was moved temporarily to a back-up location in Utrecht.

Hundreds of passengers were stranded overnight in Amsterdam and at the country’s largest train station in Utrecht, according to Dutch news agency ANP.

Richard Jonker, Netgear’s vice-president for business development, AV over IP, for the EMEA and APAC regions, commented: “All train traffic in and around Amsterdam came to a screeching halt because someone inserted a crappy SFP network fibre module.”

Arjen Boersma, director of information and communications technology at ProRail, the government organisation responsible for the rail network, told de Volksrant: “It wasn’t the case that an entire server was on fire – it was a small thing. Usually you get a notification if it breaks. Then you know where the problem is. But this wasn’t broken enough.”