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Germany's train IT resources offline due to UPS failure

23 January 2009

Here's a lesson in IT contingency planning, courtesy of Deutsche Bahn, the German railway network company, whose IT systems - including station indicator boards, electronic ticketing, self-service counter tickets and Internet pages - all went off line on January 14 due to single UPS failing.

UPSs are, of course, designed to provide backup power, but when staff at the company's Berlin Mahlsdorf center were upgrading the UPS they suddenly found the center without electricity.

The result was a catastrophic failure of DB's Web pages, which returned `404' messages to internet users. Meanwhile all the country's electronic and self-service ticketing machines went offline, as did station boards across Germany.

Embarrassed DB officials told reporters that they did have back-up systems in place, but these failed to trigger... due to the lack of power in the centre.

The company is "taking steps" to ensure the systems failure, which lasted several hours, will not happen again.

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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery • Internet and Network Security

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News

Germany's train IT resources offline due to UPS failure

Here's a lesson in IT contingency planning, courtesy of Deutsche Bahn, the German railway network company, whose IT systems - including station indicator boards, electronic ticketing, self-service counter tickets and Internet pages - all went off line on January 14 due to single UPS failing.

Comment on this article

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