taken off by the yarn take off mechanism 18 and wound on the winding device 33 to form a cross wound bobbin 22 the cross wound bobbin 22 which is rotatably mounted between the arms of a creel 21 rests in this case with its surface on the bobbin drive roller 23 and is driven by it in the winding direction via frictional engagement at the same time the yarn 30 running onto the bobbin is transferred by means of the yarn traversing mechanism 26 in such a way that it runs in crossing layers on to the lateral surface of the cross wound bobbin 22 if there is a failure for example a yarn break at one of the workstations 2 of the open end rotor spinning machine 1 which may preferably be detected by a stop motion not shown the control mechanism 9 ensures that the relevant workstation 2 is stopped in other words the drive 15 of the fiber band draw in cylinder 14 is firstly switched off in the region of the spinning device 3 and further fiber supply to the spinning rotor 4 is stopped simultaneously the drive 19 of the yarn take off mechanism 18 is simultaneously switched off and the cross wound bobbin 22 is lifted from the bobbin drive roller 23 by the mechanism 7 the spinning rotor 4 driven by a tangential belt 6 or the opening roller 12 driven by a tangential belt 13 firstly continue to rotate at operating speed when as shown in the embodiment according to fig2 single drives 31 or 59 are provided for the spinning rotor 4 or the fiber band opening roller 12.