IRCTC down: Website and app unavailable, e-ticketing services halts during holiday rush

IRCTC down: Website and app services of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the tourism and hospitality branch of the Indian Railways, witnessed a massive outage in its services on Thursday, December 26. E-ticketing services were also unavailable.

The IRCTC outage was attributed to scheduled maintenance activity. The outage caused inconvenience to thousands of users who tried to book Tatkal tickets during the holiday season.

The outage message on the IRCTC website read: “DUE TO MAINTENANCE ACTIVITY, E-TICKETING SERVICE WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE. PLEASE TRY LATER. FOR CANCELLATION/FILE TDR, PLEASE CALL AT CUSTOMER CARE NO. 14646,08044647999 & 08035734999 OR MAIL AT etickets@irctc.co.in.”

This marks the second instance in December where the IRCTC website experienced an outage, disrupting ticket bookings for thousands of passengers. Several users shared the screenshot of the outage message reflecting on the IRCTC website homepage, sharing their frustration for facing this during the holiday season.

“How can IRCTC website go down during tatkal timings???Why are we even bothering about building a bullet train when we can't even build a fucking website??” a user said on social media platform X.

One user said, “Please leave this business you guys are not capable. Hire talent or privatize this fully.”

Tagging Ashwini Vaishnaw, another user trying to book train tickets said, “It is 10:11am ... still IRCTC is not opening.…IRCTC should be enquired and checked... definitely scams are happening. By the time it opens all the tickets are gone…@AshwiniVaishnaw @irctc”

“@RailMinIndia @AshwiniVaishnaw @PMOIndia when this fraud will stop , always at 10am irctc website crashes and when you open again all tatkal tickets get booked but only premium tickets with double prices are available, this is clear scam by @IRCTCofficial,” one said.

Another user said, “India is the largest IT hub in the world, yet it cannot fix a website. You can collect taxes but fail to provide proper services in return. What a shame!”