Indian Railways showed who's boss during Microsoft outage

CHENNAI: The Windows operating system crashed on Friday making its effect palpable on all sectors across the globe. The computers went into shutdown-restart mode without booting in India, America, Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and many other countries.

The glitch was first reported at 3:26 am on Friday. Almost 80% of the world’s computers run through Windows. Many flights travelling to different places worldwide were cancelled due to the glitch. Online booking, check-in and boarding pass services were suspended. The beeline queue at airports created distress among passengers.

Government offices, banks, telecom companies, TV and radio stations, supermarkets, hospitals, social media companies, IT, metro rail and stock market sectors were among the many that plunged into inert mode after the glitch. At a time when the world got to a standstill during the windows glitch, the Indian railways resumed work as if nothing happened. Not even a single train service was suspended due to this issue.

No problem was encountered in booking tickets for local and express trains on Friday. All such services of Railways are done with the help of CRIS passenger reservation system developed in 1999. Railways developed this system during the ‘year 2000 problem’; or simply Y2K, which refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storing of calendar data for dates.