IRCTC Website Down Again, Third Outage This Month

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website and mobile app experienced a one-hour outage on Tuesday morning, causing inconvenience to passengers. This marked the third such outage this month.

Thousands of users failed to log in to the IRCTC website and those who could, were unable to book their tickets. A major outage was reported when users were trying to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets at 10 am.

According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors website status, the booking site encountered issues at 10.10 am, right after Tatkal bookings began. The service resumed after almost an hour of downtime.

Several people took to social media to highlight the difficulties in booking tickets and criticised the frequent outages, with some pointing out the need to upgrade the technology the site uses.

A user Akshay Shah tweets, "IRCTC app and web both crashed, captcha server crashed, they should stop using captcha2.0 and move to cloud, in today's cloud world why they use datacenter and servers and try becoming phantom to do all in-house idk. This is totally unacceptable." Other users also highlighted issues with captcha verification and payment declines.

This is the third time in this month that IRCTC has faced such disruptions. On December 26, the website and mobile app were down for 1.5 hours due to "maintenance activity". On December 9, the website was down for an hour making it difficult for users to book tickets online. According to the downtime message, the e-ticketing service was unavailable due to "maintenance activity".