New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) faced a major technical glitch on Friday, October 17, as both its online ticket booking website and mobile application went down, leaving thousands of users stranded during the busy festive booking period.
Visitors to the website were met with an error message reading, “Service Unavailable. This server is temporarily unable to service requests. Error code: 119.” The outage also displayed the message ‘503 Service Unavailable’ on several devices.
According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks online service disruptions, more than 5,000 users reported issuesaround 10:57 a.m. on Friday. About 53% of users faced problems with the website, 34% with the mobile app, and 13%reported difficulties in completing ticket bookings.
This isn’t the first time IRCTC has encountered such disruptions. The platform suffered a similar outage in August 2025, and crashed three times in December 2024, affecting thousands of passengers.
The latest outage comes just a day before Dhanteras, coinciding with the start of Tatkal bookings, adding to commuters’ frustration. An official statement from IRCTC on the cause of the disruption is still awaited.
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