IRCTC website crashes during peak hours leave passengers fuming

MUMBAI: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website has of late been consistently experiencing outages during peak tatkal booking hours leaving passengers reliant on physical Passenger Reservation System (PRS) counters. This has led to frustrated travellers complaining that the load on the website seems to be increasing and needs an overhaul.

On Sunday, for the fifth time in the month, the IRCTC website was down, purportedly from an unplanned outage, thereby inconveniencing lakhs of people. On logging in to book tickets, the website’s page was found displaying the downtime message: “Booking and cancellation of all sites will not be available for the next hour. Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted. For cancellation, file TDR. Please call at customer care number 14646, 08044647999, & 08035734999 or mail at etickets@irctc.co.in”.

The problem became more apparent around 10am, when Tatkal bookings were open, causing last-minute hassles to people, who had to rush to the PRS counters at the stations. Tatkal tickets are in high demand when passengers try getting a confirmed outstation trains ticket at the last moment.

The passengers did not rule out foul play. “The authorities should look if there is a possibility of ticketing agents using illegal software to target the website at this particular period, resulting in the crashing,” said Kailash Verma, member of a railway passenger association.

However, railway officials ruled out such a possibility. “There are no issues with the PRS counters which issues physical tickets from the system itself. If it was a backend system failure, then everything would have been affected,” said a senior railway official who did not want to be named.

Sources in the railways said the website is unable to handle the load. They informed that IRCTC has been working on upgrading the ticket booking system, which is expected to be ready by March this year. The wait till March, however, is not acceptable for many, especially the regular rail travellers.

“Unlike airline ticketing, where multiple online platforms offer booking options, IRCTC remains the sole online platform for railway tickets. To address this critical issue, IRCTC should strategically leverage cloud technologies to dynamically scale its server capacity during periods of high traffic, such as tatkal booking. The persistent website crashes for over a month are unacceptable,” said Akshay Mahapadi, a software engineer and member of Akhand Konkan Railway Pravasi Seva Samiti.

Officials from Center for Railway Information System (CRIS), which designs, develops and implements important systems on Indian Railways, said the software system for handling the railway ticketing is common for the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) counters that issues physical tickets from the windows and the IRCTC website. “The software handling the whole ticketing system is working normally in the backend. What we understand is that the online demand is considerable and it seems that their (IRCTC) server is not able to take the load. These servers are hosted by IRCTC and they are working on strengthening it. We are providing the best possible support to them,” said an official. 

IRCTC officials did not clarify the reasons behind the problems on their website.