Transport for NSW says yesterday’s hour-long communications outage was likely caused by a malfunctioning network switch. On Wednesday, the digital train radio system (DTRS) experienced a major malfunction. It caused widespread disruption to train service both in Sydney Metropolitan and intercity areas. It lasted for several hours.
The outage had a widespread impact on train services. It disrupted critical communication between drivers, guards, and the rail network’s management center. This resulted in the halting of all trains at stations, causing significant inconvenience to commuters.
Remote reboot of the system
Matt Logland, Sydney Trains CEO held a press conference to explain the situation. He explained that the affected network comprises 200 base stations. These stations are responsible for transmitting radio communication from central control to train drivers.
According to Lonland, the system had operated ‘’reliably since 2016’’. This was the first time they had experienced an outage of this nature. He said, ‘’When the issue first emerged at around 2.45 pm Wednesday, “staff here at the rail operations looked to do a remote reboot of the system,”
Furthermore he adds, “They looked at that process for around five minutes,”
Automatic failover to the redundant system
Matt Longland further explained that once it became apparent that the issue was affecting the network. They immediately activated their crisis management plan. They are currently investigating why the automatic failover to the redundant system did not occur as intended.
He emphasized that the system has redundancy built in to allow for an automatic switch to a backup system in the event of an incident, and this should have occurred immediately, but it did not.
Fortunately, they were able to move to a secondary data center that operates in parallel, which served as a secondary backup, allowing them to address the significant issue.
Matt Longland stated that there is presently no indication that a cyber security incident caused the outage. The investigation is concentrating on identifying the root cause of the failure.Determine why the automatic failover did not occur as intended.