The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website and mobile app faced a major outage on Friday, October 17, leaving thousands of users unable to book train tickets. Both platforms displayed the error message “503 Service Unavailable”, while an official response from IRCTC is still awaited.
According to outage-tracking portal Downdetector, over 5,000 users reported issues around 10:57 am, with 53% facing problems on the website, 34% on the app, and 13% while booking tickets.
This is not the first time IRCTC services have gone down. The platform suffered similar disruptions in August 2025 and December 2024, causing widespread inconvenience to passengers.
Notably, Friday’s outage occurred just a day before Dhanteras, coinciding with the Tatkal booking window, when user traffic typically surges. On accessing the website, users were shown the message:
“Service Unavailable. This server is temporarily unable to service requests. Error code: 119.”