The Russian state-owned railway company RZD experienced a cyberattack that caused its website and mobile app to be inaccessible for several hours. As a result, passengers were forced to purchase tickets only at railway stations. The Ukrainian hacktivist group IT Army claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel, although the authenticity of their claim couldn't be immediately verified.

RZD's system remained down for at least six hours, but the company announced later that day that it had restored its operation despite ongoing attacks. Some online services of the company are still unavailable due to the increased load on the system. IT Army stated that their objective was not to permanently take down the website but to disrupt it for a significant period, as even a one-hour outage could have a substantial impact on the aggressor country's economy.

This incident marked the second attack on RZD since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In February of the previous year, the Russian railway's website and mobile app were also rendered inaccessible due to intense distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a targeted site with excessive traffic, making it unreachable.

In response to the current cyberattack, RZD increased the number of ticket offices at railway stations to ensure passengers could still purchase tickets. Cyberattacks on railway systems have the potential to severely disrupt a country's logistics. In a similar incident last year, a cyberattack on the Belarusian state railway resulted in the network being crippled, reportedly impeding the transfer of Russian troops into Belarus for military exercises. The hacktivist collective Cyber Partisans claimed responsibility for that attack, stating that they compromised the railway system's routing and switching devices, rendering them inoperable by encrypting the stored data.