Flash has been in the process of dying for several years now, but earlier this month, it finally breathed its last. First, new browser versions stopped loading it. Then, Adobe killed it on their end, preventing Flash content from loading anywhere. While most folks around the world didn’t even notice, a train system in Dalian, China ludicrously bite the dust. They then spent nearly a day working to get their systems back online.

By 10 p.m., they had mostly restored computers to backup states—when, suddenly, automatic updates caused the systems to disable Flash again.

It was quite a comedy of errors.

Update (January 26, 2021): Reader Maxim points out something interesting: the Chinese version of Flash is not yet deprecated, and in fact will be supported indefinitely.

Adobe will support Zhongcheng’s exclusive distribution and maintenance of Flash Player within mainland China beyond 2020 for regional developers, enterprises, and end users running Flash-enabled content in applicable operating system environments or browsers.