Long live the NMBS
When an emergency occurs in a critical piece of your infrastructure, problems are to be expected. I don't think anyone can argue with that. If you do have a piece of infrastructure so critical that the use of your services all over the country will be affected by it not being there anymore, you'll want to have emergency procedures in place; one of these procedures could be having a backup copy of your infrastructure standing by, allowing it to take over should the primary break down. If you have multiple instances of almost-but-not-quite the same thing, allowing another instance of said thing to take over your functioning should you break down might be a good idea, too. If the emergency that sparks the problem in the first place turns out to be "fire", it might be a good idea to investigate your infrastructure for fire safety; you wouldn't want the same thing to happen all over again in te near future on a different site.
And if things go really bad, you will want to inform your users as much as humanly possible: in today's day and age, that would include posting something on your website, even if that's only reference to a phone number which people can call for more information.
Welcome to the real world. Long live the NMBS... Not.
Last year or so, some critical piece of infrastructure in the Brussels South trainstation burned down. As a result, trains were delayed and often cancelled for months afterwards. This clearly shows they did not have any emergency procedures in place; if they did, train services would have returned to normal after, at most, a few days. Granted, the piece of infrastructure that burned down last year was a power transfer station, which might be hard to replace, but still.
Today, another fire burned down another piece of infrastructure; this time, it was the signalling station in Brussels North. The fire itself occurred around 16:30, and from 17:30 onwards, not a single train could enter or leave Brussels anymore. Right now, more than 7 hours later, it is still impossible to get from or to Brussels. Even here, in Mechelen, it seems impossible to get to Antwerp—the opposite site, but because almost all trains to Antwerp come from Brussels, well...
And of course, the NMBS website mentions none of this. The only thing it mentions is the fact that there are "extra trains to the coast", because of the hot weather. As if anyone would be interested in taking the train right now...
Huge companies. A PITA, that's what they are.
You'd think they'd've learnt their lesson by now. These things happen quite often. Sometimes the station burns down, other times the copper cabling manages to disappear. But for crying out loud, it's a signalling station! All it does is advertise that a train is departing in a certain direction. I don't for one minute believe that they can't either do this manually or connect the affected tracks to a different node. If they can't, their infrastructure is seriously bogus.
Then again ... they are probably the most ridiculous excuse for a company. Ever. Whenever some sort of problem crops up, they'll set up a new department to deal with it. Bureaucracy doesn't even begin to describe it. One of these days, they might just focus on their core business. I'm not holding my breath though.
On a different note, weren't they replacing their signalling infrastructure by fibre?