IRCTC faces major disruption, online ticket bookings unavailable

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the online ticketing platform of Indian Railways, experienced a major outage on Thursday, disrupting access to its website and mobile app. The IRCTC attributed the downtime to scheduled maintenance activities.

A message on the IRCTC website informed users, "Due to maintenance activity, e-ticketing service will not be available." According to Downdetector, over 2,500 complaints were logged regarding the unavailability of the service.

The disruption caused significant inconvenience, particularly to users attempting to book Tatkal tickets during the busy holiday season. With millions depending on IRCTC for train ticket bookings and management, the outage sparked frustration among passengers.

This marks the second instance of service disruption on the e-ticketing platform in December.

In an advisory, IRCTC advised passengers wishing to cancel tickets to contact customer care via the numbers 14646, 08044647999, or 08035734999, or email their ticket details to etickets@irctc.co.in to initiate a Ticket Deposit Receipt (TDR) process.