Deactivation of Flash may have crippled Chinese railroad for a day [Updated]

Enlarge /. Dalian Railway Station.

In 2017, Adobe announced that it would deactivate Flash in late 2020. Earlier this month, on January 12th, Adobe continued its plans and disabled Flash installations around the world. One result, according to Apple Daily, was chaos on a Chinese railroad in Liaoning Province.

China Railway Shenyang officials use flash-based software to plan daily rail operations. As a result of the outage, Apple Daily said, "Employees have reportedly been unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequence plans, and create shunting plans."

As a result, the railroad was unable to ship its trains, "which, according to Apple Daily, resulted in a complete shutdown of its railways in Dalian, Liaoning Province."

After a day of chaos, the railroad found a solution: they reverted to an older version of Flash without the self-deactivating code. The railroad installed it early in the morning of January 13th so it could resume operations.

Officials reported excitingly about the incident in a post on the Chinese social media account QQ.

"After more than 20 hours of fighting, nobody complained and nobody gave up," they wrote (according to Google Translate). "Even when there is little hope, there is motivation to move forward."

The post was mocked on the Chinese internet, with observers suggesting that railroad officials could have anticipated this problem and devised a non-flash mailing system months earlier. The post has been removed, but a copy is still available on archive.org.

Update 7:30 p.m. EST: Reader Aube found this blog post when asked if the Flash problem is affecting train dispatch. It is also said that the railroad has reverted to an old version of Adobe Flash, but not a pirated version. As a non-Chinese speaker, I have a hard time being sure whether the Apple Daily story is correct or not.