The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) app and website faced a major outage on Thursday, leaving many passengers unable to book tickets. Frustrated users took to social media to report the issue. Downdetector, a platform that monitors online service disruptions, recorded a surge in complaints. IRCTC has not yet issued a statement regarding the outage.
When users tried opening the IRCTC app, they encountered an error message reading, “Unable to perform action due to maintenance activity.”
A frustrated user on X, formerly known as Twitter, shared, “It is 10:11 am … 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.”
“India reached the moon, but the Indian Railways ticket booking app can’t handle Tatkal booking without crashing. It’s 2024, and a stable server shouldn’t be rocket science!” a third person said.
This marks the second major IRCTC outage this month. Earlier, the e-ticketing platform underwent a scheduled one-hour maintenance on December 9.
Wednesday’s outage sparked anger among passengers attempting to book ‘tatkal’ tickets. These tickets, available one day before a train’s departure from its originating station, have specific booking windows: 10 AM for AC classes and 11 AM for non-AC classes.