Online reservations system broken

[mmh]

Something seems amiss with online ticket booking. No services have any advance fares, and some journeys in the future don't have any fares available. Appears to be across the board, all operators and all retailers.

 

[ivorytoast28]

Maybe LNER will regret their "compulsory reservation" settings finally

You can't currently book any of their services

 

[Adam Williams]

RDG's certificate for the reservations API gateway expired at midnight. All Advance availability and booking-of-reservations is completely broken across the entire industry.

This also previously happened in June 2023. At the time, I asked the following questions:

Why is certificate (re)-issuance not automated with ACME for this service? This shouldn't be a manual process - there are providers that will do this automatically (Let's Encrypt for DV, GlobalSign for OV certs etc) without any human involvement.

Is there really only one person responsible for this? This issue led to a total production outage which prevented both Avanti & c2c (who have both moved to the RARS2 API for reservations)'s retail sites from making reservations as well as preventing retailers from sending out timetable service cancellation notices. I am relieved that we were still on the RARS broker so that the impact was not more widespread.

Why were there no automated alerts configured to warn you at 14 days, 7 days, 1 day etc away from expiry? Was there no automated alerting / on-call rotation that meant that someone was alerted to this problem when the certificate expired at midnight?

I never received a reply.

Retailers will still be able to retail walk-ups because there isn't a giant single point-of-failure today when it comes to those sales. They won't be able to sell Advances, or where the train operator has tied hands by incorrectly adding false so-called "Compulsory Reservations" flags into the timetable data.

 

[tram21]

Is there not some illegality with this that customers are being overcharged due to the rail industry's incompetence?

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

This also previously happened in June 2023 [...] I am relieved that we were still on the RARS broker so that the impact was not more widespread.

Not even that option any more for most (may even have gone already). It's not good enough, and no bulletin has yet been created to explain the situation to customers

 

[81A]

Expect ticket office/TvM queues… Or empty trains on “reservations compulsory“ routes if they don’t fix this quickly.

 

[stuartl]

Cross country's website seems to be OK.

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

Cross country's website seems to be OK.

Looks like it's been fixed

 

[Adam Williams]

The cert has been replaced with one that expires on Dec 31st.

 

[mmh]

Looks like it's been fixed

I thought it'd be shortly after 9am, but I guess RDG's IT ops person must start work at 8am.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Jun 2026 ==

The cert has been replaced with one that expires on Dec 31st.

Thanks for that - I'll pop a reminder in my calendar to buy any train tickets for the new year ahead of time!

 

[Adam Williams]

It is not the first time that the response to issues overnight has seemingly been limited to sending out comms about the issue. I can remember plenty of issues that have been reported out-of-hours by on-call staff at retailers, but very few that have been resolved OOH.

Markedly different to how things work at a retailer for their own technology, of course.

I think this one was broken for 8h10m 7h10m (see below) which is really quite poor given what the system does.

 

[crablab]

I think this one was broken for 8h10m which is really quite poor given what the system does.

In other industries, regulators would be unhappy if a such an important customer facing system was unavailable for such a length of time.

Especially if customers were inconvenienced or disadvantaged as a result.
Especially if this had happened before.

 

[alistairlees]

RARS was broken from 01:00 to 08:05 (because of out of date certificate)

 

[Adam Williams]

RARS was broken from 01:00 to 08:05 (because of out of date certificate)

Ah yeah, it'll be 7 hours because the cert expiry would've been UTC presumably

 

[voyagerdude220]

The cert has been replaced with one that expires on Dec 31st.

I question how/why nothing was done to prevent such a simple oversight (a certificate expiring) from causing massive problems.

(I'm not having a go at you, just amazed that such a simple issue wasn't detected in advance.)

 

[Adam Williams]

I question how/why nothing was done to prevent such a simple oversight (a certificate expiring) from causing massive problems

Yeah, so do I.

(To be clear I wasn't involved in fixing this, just reported what I'd seen changed!)

 

[TrainTraveler]

"I question how/why nothing was done to prevent such a simple oversight (a certificate expiring) from causing massive problems."

At a guess, staffing changes at whoever supports the RDG system.

If the person "who knows" has left there may not be anyone who checks these things.

 

[Adam Williams]

It shouldn't rely on people checking things at all, there should be automated monitoring in place.

 

[Sun Chariot]

It shouldn't rely on people checking things at all, there should be automated monitoring in place.

Exactly. My most recent employing sector, aviation, had an automated and multi-level pre-emptive monitoring for all certificates.

 

[voyagerdude220]

"I question how/why nothing was done to prevent such a simple oversight (a certificate expiring) from causing massive problems."

At a guess, staffing changes at whoever supports the RDG system.

If the person "who knows" has left there may not be anyone who checks these things.

I'm guessing that's the case.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Jun 2026 ==

It shouldn't rely on people checking things at all, there should be automated monitoring in place.

Precisely. Particularly as we're now aware of the massive consequences of the certificate not being renewed on time.

 

[Watershed]

I set up autorenewing Let's Encrypt certificates when messing around with my own private domain the best part of 10 years ago. There's absolutely no excuse for this degree of negligence.

 

[cheshlanc]

I was affected by this today, arriving to catch my train to work I found that I was unable to buy a ticket online or at the Avanti ticket machine at the station. Thankfully a kind fellow commuter let me skip a place in the queue (he wanted a later train) and I managed to buy a ticket at the ticket office in time to catch my train. What would my rights have been if the queue had been longer and I wasn't able to buy a ticket before my train left?

 

[AlterEgo]

Is there not some illegality with this that customers are being overcharged due to the rail industry's incompetence?

How are they being overcharged? Advance fares can never be guaranteed. Whether they are removed from sale by error or by strategy is neither here nor there.

 

[JamesT]

I set up autorenewing Let's Encrypt certificates when messing around with my own private domain the best part of 10 years ago. There's absolutely no excuse for this degree of negligence.

Especially as this sounds like a normal webserver deployment. If you're working with some sort of appliance where there's no shell access then you're at the mercy of the vendor if they've exposed ACME configuration, or if it's on a private network where you can't respond to the challenge.

 

[blimmo]

I was affected by this today, arriving to catch my train to work I found that I was unable to buy a ticket online or at the Avanti ticket machine at the station. Thankfully a kind fellow commuter let me skip a place in the queue (he wanted a later train) and I managed to buy a ticket at the ticket office in time to catch my train. What would my rights have been if the queue had been longer and I wasn't able to buy a ticket before my train left?

None. You're expected to arrive an indeterminate amount of time in advance for your train so you have time to purchase your ticket. Avanti might give you discretionary compensation though.

 

[tram21]

I was affected by this today, arriving to catch my train to work I found that I was unable to buy a ticket online or at the Avanti ticket machine at the station. Thankfully a kind fellow commuter let me skip a place in the queue (he wanted a later train) and I managed to buy a ticket at the ticket office in time to catch my train. What would my rights have been if the queue had been longer and I wasn't able to buy a ticket before my train left?

You could definitely buy onboard due to the extraordinary circumstances, with no suitable ticket purchasing facilities at the station.

 

[TUC]

Presumably there must be multiple automated reminders that are sent, as with many other online licences and subscription?

 

[Haywain]

You could definitely buy onboard due to the extraordinary circumstances, with no suitable ticket purchasing facilities at the station.

Suitable ticket purchasing facilities includes a ticket office, which was open.

 

[TUC]

Suitable ticket purchasing facilities includes a ticket office, which was open.

But able to offer the full range of Advance fares, including those which would otherwise still be available for travel today?

 

[bcarmicle]

TOCs are under no obligation to the customer to offer any Advance fares.