Sources confirm that British intelligence agencies have launched an urgent investigation into a catastrophic IT failure at a German data centre that has paralysed Eurostar train services and threatens to sever cross-Channel links for days. The shutdown, which began at 03:00 GMT on Wednesday, wiped out reservation systems, signalling networks, and passenger check-in platforms across the Channel Tunnel operation. Documents obtained by this newsroom reveal that the failure originated from a facility in Frankfurt operated by a subsidiary of Siemens.
The scale of the outage is unprecedented. Eurostar has cancelled all trains until further notice, stranding thousands of passengers at St Pancras and Gare du Nord. A source inside the Joint Cyber Unit of GCHQ told me: 'We are treating this as a potential hostile act.
The pattern of the failure mirrors known attack vectors used by state-sponsored groups.' No group has yet claimed responsibility. The timing is acutely sensitive.
Eurostar carries 20 million passengers a year and is the backbone of London's financial connectivity to continental Europe. A prolonged shutdown could trigger billions in lost economic activity. The German Federal Office for Information Security, the BSI, has also mobilised, but sources say they are struggling to restore 'fundamental system integrity'.
Siemens has declined to comment. The investigation is being led by the National Cyber Security Centre, working with MI5 and the German Federal Intelligence Service. The question now: is this a catastrophic accident or a rehearsal for something worse?
