German Rail blames hackers for IT issues.
A hacker attack appears to be the source of the IT issues with Deutsche Bahn's information and booking system. "Following a DDoS attack yesterday at noon against Deutsche Bahn's IT systems, bahn.de and DB Navigator are currently available to all passengers again," the company announced on Wednesday. "Our defensive measures were effective in minimizing the impact on our customers."
The abbreviation DDoS stands for "Distributed Denial of Service" and is a very old attack method: it involves orchestrated mass requests to servers designed to overload and thus disable them. On Tuesday afternoon, there were already problems with the "DB Navigator" app and the bahn.de website. Further disruptions occurred on Wednesday.
The railway staff were apparently informed earlier about the suspected cause of the problems. A SPIEGEL editor heard an announcement on an ICE train Wednesday morning in which hackers were blamed for the problems with the DB Navigator app.
Sharply increased number of attacks
The threat posed by DDoS attacks has increased dramatically recently. According to Cloudflare, a company that protects providers from such attacks, both the number and severity of these attacks rose significantly last year. The company recorded 47.1 million such attacks for 2025, compared to 21.3 million the previous year.