IRCTC website down: Site and App experience major outage ahead of new year, third in a month

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) faced significant outages today, affecting its website and mobile app for train ticket bookings. This marks the third such disruption in December, coinciding with the busy travel season as the New Year approaches.

Thousands of users reported difficulties logging into the IRCTC platform, with many unable to complete their ticket purchases. A notable outage occurred around 10 AM when users attempted to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets, leading to widespread frustration.

Social media was flooded with complaints from users expressing their dissatisfaction. One user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, “#IRCTC app and web both crashed, captcha server crashed, they should stop using captcha2.0 and move to cloud, in today's cloud world why they use datacenter and servers and try becoming phantom to do all in-house idk. This is totally un-acceptable."

Another user shared, “IRCTC down just before Tatkal booking—classic timing! Anyone else facing the same issue? #IRCTC #TatkalBooking,” along with screenshots of the error messages.

Concerns about the app's performance were also raised, with one user stating, “@IRCTCofficial @RailMinIndia @amofficialCRIS What kind of nonsense is this during tatkal booking? No Captcha, on clicking reload showing unable to perform transaction 🤦‍♂️and down again #tatkal #IRCTC."

This disruption follows two previous outages this month: on December 26, the website and app were down for 1.5 hours due to “maintenance activity,” and on December 9, users faced issues for an hour, also attributed to maintenance.