Compatible with everything from browser games to live streaming, Adobe Flash was not the Internet’s favorite multimedia platform for no reason. Even in its heyday, however, Flash was not universally loved; it had security flaws, it could be difficult to optimize and it didn’t work with all browsers, especially those on mobile devices. When HTML5 came on the scene, Flash began to fall out of favor, and in July 2017, Adobe announced that it would end support in late 2020, giving users three and a half years to switch to new software. That message, however, did not reach every corner of the IT globe, and when the Flash time bomb code exploded on January 12, it did more than just make nostalgic browser games more difficult to revisit: it brought an entire Chinese railway for a standstill.
According to a Apple Daily, the problem arose at the China Railway Shenyang in Dalian, Liaoning, shortly after 8am on Tuesday, January 12th. According to an event schedule outlined by Github, the head of a switching station reported that he was unable to access the railroad schedules, which is usually done through a browser-based Flash interface. Over the next half hour, reports of similar failures arrived from across the network, with up to 30 stations involved, according to a statement by CR Shenyang reported by a Chinese blog.
It was only after technicians went online to search for bug fixes that employees learned of the global shutdown of Flash, news that apparently did not penetrate the Chinese island Internet. A translation of the Github timeline suggests the restoration of temporarily restored software backups from service around noon, although interruptions returned again around 2 pm, and later in the evening. CR Shenyang’s response team then began exploring a rollback to older software systems, their options apparently consisting of an unspecified Microsoft-based configuration or an archived and pirated version of Flash without the “time bomb” code. The technicians chose the latter and, around 1am on the 13th, CR Shenyang successfully put one of its stations fully online. At 2:30 am, all but one route was back in service, with the railroad nightmare Y2K21 behind it.
Adobe will certainly not be happy to know that its abandonware will crumble in pirated form, although whatever is most difficult to take legal action against CR Shenyang. Copyright laws in China, as Captain Barbossa would say, are treated more like what would you call guidelines than actual rules.
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h / t Jalopnik