The IRCTC site, which is the key online train ticket booking website in India, had a major outage preceding the festive season on Sunday that briefly paralyzed the site, as thousands of passengers attempted to purchase tickets ahead of Deepavali.
The failure started in the later part of the night at the end of the weekend and extended close to the first part of the Sunday, with the users reporting that the website and the mobile app were either dead or displayed error messages in the payment part.
Numerous travelers went online to use X (previously Twitter) to express their anger by posting screenshots of broken transactions and unfinished bookings.
One user wrote, I tried to make a booking for a Chennai to Bengaluru ticket, but the IRCTC website crashed in two attempts.
One more added,it has always been the same story every year during the season of festivals. The framework is unable to cope with the hurry.
The officials stated that an unusual influx in traffic was the reason behind the crash, with millions of users signing in at the same time to reserve last minute Deepavali travel tickets.
The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) also confirmed a technical glitch that has hit the web and app service but promised their customers that they were in the process of restoring operations within this time frame.
Our technical team has defined that the reason is the high load on servers that happened because of the users in their canine numbers.
We are in the process of scaling up our systems, and things should go back to normal very soon, an IRCTC spokesperson said in a statement.
It could not have come at a better time to go down. The demand for the tickets had scaled high, with ticket prices soaring on the route to Delhi, Lucknow, Chennai, Coimbatore, and Mumbai Ahmedabad especially, as Deepavali holidays were approaching.
A lot of the passengers complained that they resorted to offline booking counters or third party travel booking networks with the hopes of being able to get seats.
It is not the first time that the IRCTC platform has experienced problems during peak seasons.
The same kind of technical failures had been reported in Holi and Onam earlier this year that caused the capacity of the Internet of the site to cater to the increasing online traffic to be questioned.
Experts in the industry have advised the IRCTC to invest in more robust server infrastructure and load balancing systems, with reference to the increased number of online buyers of tickets within the Indian region.
Having close to 8 lakh average daily ticket bookings, it is still considered to be one of the largest online ticketing systems in the world and yet is that which suffers the most during ticket surges during the festive seasons.
On Sunday evening, IRCTC reported that it had restored service to some parts, but the users were still reporting periodic slowness.
The passengers are encouraged to keep on trying after some time intervals and not press the refresh button, as this will only overload the servers.
Travellers, in the main, are optimistic that by then the problem will be sorted out completely before Deepavali, so bookings will go down smoothly as the millions of people intending to fly back home to observe the festivity will be making their arrangements.
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Customers may visit the current changes of services on X on the web at www.irctc.co.in or on the official handle of X on X at the current announcements at the Twitter account of IRCTC official.
