The resumption of service, scheduled for Monday after a 48-hour stoppage and a week marked by the tragic derailment in Gelida, was frustrated. Early in the morning, Rodalies attempted to progressively reactivate circulation, but two incidents at the CTC forced the trains to stop again. The first failure occurred around 7 a.m., followed by a second half an hour later, generating confusion among users at Renfe stations.

The CTC, or Centralized Traffic Control at Estació de França, is the basic technological and computer system that acts as the nerve center for Rodalies operations. This system is fundamental as it allows the status of the tracks and trains to be displayed, routes to be established, and all rail traffic to be managed. This morning's failures have been described by Adif as infrequent “IT crashes” that cause the entire network to shut down.

This is not the first time the CTC has experienced a crash. In September 2022, the system suffered an outage that affected all Rodalies trains, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. On that occasion, the error was attributed to a system update that particularly affected radio communications with the trains. A similar failure was also recorded in 2015.

Following previous incidents, the Govern (Catalan Government) had already demanded “guarantees” from Adif that these technical problems would not happen again. Currently, Adif is investigating the causes of the two consecutive failures this morning, not ruling out any hypothesis, including a possible cyber sabotage. The service is progressively recovering now that the incident has, in principle, been resolved.