In 2017, Adobe announced that it would disable Flash at the end of 2020. Earlier this month, on January 12, Adobe implemented its plans, disabling Flash installations around the world. One result, according to the Apple Daily, was chaos on a Chinese railway in Liaoning province.
China Railway Shenyang employees use Flash-based software to plan daily rail operations. As a result of the shutdown, says the Apple Daily, “employees were unable to view the train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and organize maneuver plans”.
As a result, the railroad was unable to dispatch its trains, “leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province,” according to the Apple Daily.
After a day of chaos, the railway found a solution: it obtained a pirated version of Flash without the self-deactivating code. The railway installed it at dawn on January 13, allowing operations to resume.
Authorities gave an emotional step-by-step account of the incident in a post on 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 if there is little hope, there is a motivation to move on.”
The post attracted some mockery on the Chinese Internet, with observers pointing out that railroad workers could have anticipated the problem and developed a non-Flash dispatch system months earlier. The post has been removed, but a copy is still available at archive.org.