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Berlin subway ticket machines go down

Summary: Another travel related failure...Ticket dispensers in the Berlin subway system stopped working on July 1 after a faulty update from central HQ.

Michael Krigsman

By for Beyond IT Failure |

Berlin subway ticket machines go down

Another travel related failure...

Ticket dispensers in the Berlin subway system stopped working on July 1 after a faulty update from central HQ. From Berliner Morgenpost (German translation by Debora Weber-Wulff in Risks Digest):

More than 600 of the 700 ticket machines refused to work after they were updated from a central server overnight. An unnamed Swiss company was updating the database (probably for fare calculation) when the machines began failing. It took until 1 pm for the error to be fixed on all machines.

In the meantime, security people walked around encouraging people to just get on the trains. The ticket checkers (who travel undercover and announce ticket controls just after the doors close) were pulled from the subway and put on bus and tram duty.

Last February, Boston subway fare collection machines went down, but for completely different reasons. In that case, an overloaded system seemed to cause the failure.

[Image from hollaBackpackers]

Topics: Servers, Hardware, Security

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5 comments
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  • .....

    Sounds like someone declared an int when it should have been a float! Either that or their is a missing/mis-placed decimal. ]:)
    Linux User 147560
    Reply Vote

  • Good response.

    Eat a day's revenue and just offer free.

    TripleII
    TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827
    Reply Vote

    • Don't think they had a choice

      After all, the machines didn't work and people were waiting for trains.
      mkrigsman@...
      Reply Vote

  • RE: Berlin subway ticket machines go down

    But what was the underlying OS? It's no fun if we don't get heap contumely on something!
    Henrik Moller
    Reply Vote

    • You got it all wrong.

      OS failures are not the political trigger of the day - who was the system outsourced to? To throw some more fuel into the fire, I bet it was some company like TCS or CTS where you pay peanuts and throw a thousand monkeys at the problem hoping for closure.
      kraterz
      Reply Vote
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