(The Associated Press circulated the following article on November 22.)
FORT WORTH, Texas — Signals on the BNSF Railway network were temporarily disrupted Tuesday afternoon when a scheduled software upgrade malfunctioned, company officials said.
Lena Kent, BNSF director of public affairs, said the disruption extended throughout the railway’s 28-state system. The outage lasted less than 30 minutes in most places but lasted an hour and a half in California, she said.
Joe Faust, BNSF’s regional director of public affairs, said the outage occurred at 7:05 p.m. CST. He said the outage did not cause any accidents.
“It did cause slowdowns around the system,” he said. “There was no sense of danger to any employees or anything.”
The problem originated from BNSF’s network operating center in Fort Worth, he said.