The suspension of all bullet train service Jan. 17 on JR East's five shinkansen lines — Tohoku, Akita, Yamagata, Joetsu and Nagano shinkansen lines — reminds railways and any organization, for that matter, of the importance of sharing important information among personnel concerned and designing a computer system that can flexibly cope with changing situations.

At 8:23 a.m. on that day, a screen of the Computerized Safety Maintenance and Operation Systems of Shinkansen (COSMOS) at JR East's shinkansen traffic control center in Tokyo blacked out. Traffic controllers halted all of JR East's shinkansen services until 9:38 a.m., fearing that the system, which controls JR East's shinkansen network, had broken down.

JR East later explained that the trouble occurred because train schedule changes necessitated after railway switches had frozen that morning in Shin-Shirakawa and Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture, overburdened COSMOS' capacity.