There will be some brief periods of downtime on Wednesday 25 December 2024 for back-up restoration drills. The periods of downtime will be brief ( < 1 minute). If HOPS is working when you visit it it is safe to use. There will periods of downtime between 7.30am and 9.30am GMT on Thursday 9 January 2025. The period of downtime is likely to be at least 45 minutes. This is to facilitate server upgrade work which will improve resilience and reduce the requirement for downtime in the future. A two-hour range is being advertised to ensure there is sufficient time to roll-back to the old server if required. If HOPS is working when you visit it it is safe to use. This downtime is being held-over from December to avoid disturbance or risk to Christmas operations at all railways. The two-hour period on 9 January starts at 7.30am GMT, that's: 15:30-17:30 AWST in West Australia 17:00-19:00 ACST in Northern Territory 18:00-20:00 ACDT in South Australia 17:30-19:30 AEST in Queensland 18:30-20:30 AEDT in New South Wales / Victoria / Tazmania 09:30-11:30 in Italy 09:30-11:30 in South Africa Part of this work includes changes to reduce or eliminate the need for downtime in the future, which has become all the more important now that HOPS deals with sales transactions. Time Register devices will be unaffected and will store up transactions until HOPS comes back online. POS devices will display a prompt inviting the operator to 'work offline', after which they will work normally and upload transactions when HOPS comes back online. Card payments are unaffected. For confidence, there will be a brief test period after the site is taken offline to prove the POS devices before work starts, during which time the work can be aborted if necessary. Public ticket sales websites will be offline. We apologise for any inconvenience. If you have any queries please contact your HOPS Admin, or HOPS Admins contact HOPS HQ. Thank you.