LAHORE: The electronic system of e-ticketing and financial and human resources of the Pakistan Railways (PR) collapsed on Tuesday, leaving 60 online reservation offices disconnected from the main servers amid fear of loss of data since 2016 to date.

It has yet to be established if the glitch occurred due to an attack by hackers or due to the non-maintenance of the system.

The PR administration said they have restored the online seat reservation system by using the host server of the National Telecom Corporation. However, they are working to restore the system to recover data on finances, salaries, pensions, etc.

Farooq Iqbal Malik, PR officiating IT director, told Dawn on Wednesday: “We have started recovering data by using other applications and servers available with us.”

He said he was not able to confirm the possibility of hackers’ attack on the system since the team was recovering the data.

“After recovering data, we will start finding the reasons behind the system’s failure,” he added.

“The system, all of sudden, went into shutdown mode,” an official source told Dawn.

The official, requesting anonymity, said the PR administration also brought some IT experts from the market for recovering the data and used the NTC host server to understand the situation.

An official said that in 2019, the previous IT team floated a proposal seeking funds for updating the system to avert the problems related to link down, collapse, cyber-attacks, etc.

“But the PR didn’t pay heed towards this proposal. And resultantly the issues started emerging,” he said. The expert said, later, the PR hired an IT director in January last who was sacked after six months. When contacted, PR Chairman Dr Habibur Rehman Gilani said the e-ticketing at 35 places had been resumed.

“I think the PR administration should have decided engaging the NTC much before rather than relying on its ‘abilities’. It is negligence of our officials,” he said, adding that an inquiry had been ordered to find out the reason behind the system failure.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2021