Adobe killed Flash — and a Chinese railroad's dispatching died with it for a day

Adobe announced in 2017 that it would deactivate Flash at the end of 2020, and carried it out on January 12, 2021, killing Flash installations worldwide. According to Apple Daily, one result was chaos at China Railway Shenyang, which used Flash-based software to plan each day's railroad operations in Liaoning province.

Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules, or arrange shunting plans, leaving the railroad unable to dispatch trains — 'leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province,' per Apple Daily's account as reported by Ars Technica. After more than 20 hours, the railroad found its fix: it reverted to an older version of Flash without the self-deactivating code, installed early on January 13, and operations resumed.

Railroad officials celebrated the all-nighter on a Chinese social media account — 'After more than 20 hours of fighting, no one complained, and no one gave up' — and drew mockery instead, with observers noting the problem had been announced years earlier and a non-Flash dispatching system could have been built in that time. The post was taken down, though a copy survived on archive.org. Ars Technica later flagged a Chinese blog disputing whether dispatching was truly affected and saying the reinstated Flash was an old official version; the outlet could not independently verify the account.

Staffers reportedly could not view train diagrams or shunting plans, and railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province halted dispatching for roughly a day

Day-to-day train dispatching depended on software built on a platform with a publicly scheduled death date

No migration to a non-Flash dispatching system happened in the three years between announcement and deactivation

The recovery plan — reinstalling an obsolete runtime — restored service but left the underlying dependency in place

A vendor kill switch announced three years ahead still takes down anyone who treats 'deprecated' as someone else's problem

As of 2021-01-25 operations at the Dalian railroads had resumed on the older Flash version, with the episode documented in a since-deleted social media post and disputed details reported secondhand.