Travellers across the Netherlands were left stranded on Sunday as Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) suffered a nationwide blackout and all trains were cancelled. On Monday morning, NS announced that the issue had been resolved and that all trains were up and running again - but that there would be some deviations from the usual timetable.
At around midday on April 3, the Dutch train operator noticed a technical failure in their computer systems, leading to issues regarding work schedules for staff members and train timetables for travellers.
Initially, NS had announced that, as a result of the technical failure, no trains would be running until around 5pm. This was later pushed back to 8pm but, by Sunday evening, the company announced that even though the issues had been resolved, all trains scheduled for Sunday would be cancelled “due to the enormous impact of the disruption to the IT system.”
NS had offered bus replacement services for passengers whose travel plans had been disrupted, although the train cancellations led to chaos at train stations across various Dutch cities and at Schiphol Airport.
By Monday morning, NS announced that trains were once again running according to their usual timetable, but that there would be some minor differences for passengers. “Due to the outage, many trains were in the wrong place yesterday,” the company explained in a statement. “That is why our colleagues were busy last night getting the trains back to the right place as much as possible.”
As a result of these unexpected difficulties, anyone hoping to make use of public transport on Monday may notice that “the length of trains might deviate from what [they] are normally used to [and] the type of train may be different than usual.”
NS has issued an apology to all those who were affected by the cancellations over the weekend: “We are well aware that yesterday we made an enormous appeal to the understanding and self-reliance of the traveller. That is not what our travellers can expect from us and are used to from us.” NS is investigating the cause of the technical difficulties, and continues to advise passengers to double-check the NS Travel Planner ahead of their journey.