In a method for the emergency shutdown of a bus system, and a bus system, having a master module and bus subscribers disposed in series, the master module and the bus subscribers sending data packets to one another with the aid of a data line, the method has the temporally consecutive method steps: in a first method step, a bus subscriber and/or the master module detect(s) an error status, in a second method step, the bus subscriber and/or the master module send(s) an emergency signal to all bus subscribers and to the master module, in a third method step, a further bus subscriber receives the emergency signal, immediately forwards it to an adjacent bus subscriber and simultaneously evaluates it, and in a fourth method step, the further bus subscriber shuts itself down automatically.