The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website faced a major outage on Saturday morning, leaving thousands of passengers unable to book train tickets during the festive rush.
With Diwali and Chhath Puja approaching, a sudden spike in online traffic overwhelmed the system, causing the website to go down temporarily. Users attempting to log in were met with the message: “This site is currently unreachable; please try again later.”
Festive Season Strain on Ticket Booking
The demand for train tickets surges dramatically during festivals, especially during Tatkal bookings, when passengers try to grab last-minute seats. This heavy load often leads to slowdowns or crashes on the IRCTC portal — a recurring issue seen in previous festive seasons as well.
Social Media Reactions
Frustrated passengers took to social media, sharing screenshots of error messages and expressing anger over failed booking attempts. The outage impacted users across the country, with many reporting repeated login failures and incomplete transactions.
Technical Glitch and Server Overload
Experts suggest that the massive early-morning login surge overwhelmed the servers, triggering a system crash. Limited server capacity continues to be a weak spot for the IRCTC platform, particularly during peak booking hours around festivals.
Recurring Problem and Needed Upgrades
A similar outage occurred just last week ahead of Diwali, when users encountered error code 109 during Tatkal bookings. Experts have urged IRCTC to expand its server capacity and strengthen its infrastructure to handle festival-season traffic.
For now, passengers have been advised to retry after some time as the technical team works to restore full functionality.