IRCTC down: Latest outage disrupts tatkal ticket bookings, leaving users frustrated

IRCTC website is once again facing an outage, leading to users on social media posting about the inability to book their tatkal tickets. Users on the IRCTC app and the official website shared screenshots of a downtime or error message while booking tatkal tickets.

The IRCTC website does not attribute any reason for the outage and instead just informs, “Booking and Cancellation for All site will not be available for next hour. Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted.”

The outage comes at a time when most people would have been hoping to book their tatkal tickets in order to enjoy a peaceful vacation in the first week of the new year. The current outage 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.

Netizens react to IRCTC outage:

“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 un-acceptable” one user on X noted

“It's been a decade and more. Our IRCTC website still chokes during Tatkal time.” added another user

One frustrated user online went to the extent of making allegations that a ‘scam’ is underway, writing “This is some scam definitely that is why no action is being taken despite, the same issues every time.”

“Why does irctc is under maintenance at the time of tatkal booking today” Added another user.

“Would suggest #irctc to make tatkal booking timing exact 24 hours from train time, so traffic gets distributed and your poor server doesn't get down.” one user added