In Poland, government cybersecurity chief Janusz Cieszynski,
said a team tasked with handling emergency situations will meet Thursday to
investigate the malfunction.
Poland’s PKP PLK railway company Director Miroslaw
Skubiszynski, said that the sudden outage took place at 0300GMT Thursday and
affected 19 out of Poland’s 33 control centers, idling train traffic on some
820 kilometers (500 miles) of railroads.
“Because the reach of the outage is almost nationwide, it is
clear that some of the trains will not run at all today,” Skubiszynski told
reporters.
Skubiszynski did not say what could have caused the outage.
Poland’s railway was asking travelers to put off train journeys Thursday as
railway experts worked alongside the government’s cyber security team to
gradually restore traffic.
Skubiszynski said authorities were working to ensure that
the outage does not hamper the travel plans of Ukrainian refugees. Special bus
services were made available.
Poland has admitted some 1.95 million refugees fleeing war
and Russian aggression on Ukraine. On Tuesday, the prime minister of Poland
joined his Czech and Slovenian counterparts on a special train trip from Poland
to Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to show their solidarity with the country. They
safely returned Wednesday morning.
In Italy, railway company TRENITALIA issued an alert saying
that control system outage had caused major problems along the key
Rome-Florence line.
Many trains faced delays of up to two hours or have been
cancelled because of problems to the centralized computer control system,
Italian State Railway said.
Infrastructure company Alstom said in a statement that
Thursday’s delays on the Italian State Railway were due to a computer bug in
signaling software provided by Bombardier Transportation.
Alstrom said the malfunction was not the result of a
cyberattack and that the safety of passengers was not at risk. A “mitigation
plan” has proactively been put in place to minimize and potential disruption,
the company said.
The company’s Italy branch said that the same problem
affected railway systems in Thailand and India.
Alstom owns a 20% stake in Transmashholding (TMH), the
Russian locomotives and rail equipment provider. It has suspended all future
business investments in Russia. Talks on a partnership between Alstom and
Ukraine rail operator UZ have been put on hold as a result of the war in the
country.