The website of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) was down for almost three hours on Tuesday due to technical glitches. In a tweet at 10:03 am, the railway ticketing monopoly said its service was unavailable on the IRCTC site and the mobile app.
“Alternatively tickets can be booked through other B2C players like amazon, and Makemytrip,” IRCTC said in a subsequent tweet at 10:42 am. These players also route their bookings through the IRCTC services handled by Centre for Railway Information Systems, which is under the administrative control of the Railways Ministry.
Officials maintained that there was no hacking attempt and that this was a technical glitch that has now been resolved. At 2:18 pm, IRCTC announced that the booking issue on its website has been resolved.
The downtime coincided with the Tatkal (emergency) booking window of IRCTC. This disgruntled many commuters on the Indian Railways network who were hoping to book tickets a day ahead of their journey. These are also the hours when there is high volume of simultaneous bookings on the website due to the paucity to seat and berth availability on high demand routes.
Some desktop and laptop users complained that despite the assurance from IRCTC, they were unable to access the website and book tickets.