Ukraine railway traffic stable after cyberattack knocks out ticketing system

Ukraine's state-owned railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said on Monday traffic was not disrupted by a cyberattack that knocked out its online ticketing system.

"Operational traffic did not stop for a single moment. The enemy attack was aimed to stop trains, but we quickly switched to backup systems," Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, Ukrzaliznytsia's board chairman, told national TV.

The company did not explicitly identify who was behind the attack, but describing it as the work of the enemy implicitly pointed the finger at Russia, which has regularly attacked Ukraine's railways with drones and missiles since its full-scale invasion in 2022.

A Ukrainian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Moscow's intention appeared to be to create psychological pressure on Ukraine's population and destabilise the social and political situation with a cyberattack.

The outage was first reported on Sunday when Ukrzaliznytsia notified users about the failure in the IT system and told passengers to buy tickets on-site or on trains.

Work to restore the online ticket system has been underway since the previous day, the company said on Telegram, describing the attack as "systemic, non-trivial and multi-level".

People were queuing in long lines to buy tickets at Kyiv's central station from Monday morning. Ticket offices said tickets were available only for travel until Tuesday.

After the Russian invasion in 2022 and the closure of airspace over Ukraine, trains became the main mode of transportation for domestic and international passengers.

The railway is also the main route for weapons and equipment deliveries. It carried around 20 million passengers and 148 million tonnes of freight last year, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said in December.