Norfolk Southern believes a software defect — not a hacker — was the cause of the widespread computer outage that forced the railroad to park all of its trains for most of a day earlier this week.
The railroad said Friday that it traced Monday’s problem to a defect in the software one of its vendors was using to perform maintenance on its data storage systems.
Both the railroad’s primary and backup systems became unresponsive at the same time. The update was made to one system and then automatically copied to the other system allowing the defect to spread. Norfolk Southern didn’t identify the vendor except to call it “a leading global technology provider.”
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