Booking of tickets for the special inter-state trains was delayed as the IRCTC website crashed for several hours on Monday, with officials stating that the high demand for a limited number of tickets may have led to the crash.
As part of the move to restart normal operations of trains, the Indian Railways had notified 15 pairs of trains across the country. Though the bookings were to begin at 4 pm, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) site was down till 5.30 pm.
The Ministry of Railways stated that “data pertaining to special trains were being fed” to the site. While the ministry said that the bookings began at 6 pm, information on many trains was not loaded for many trains till 6.30 pm.
The website started accepting bookings for some trains around 6.30 pm, with tickets for the Tuesday train from New Delhi to Bengaluru (02692) getting sold out within 10 minutes. Even at 7.30 pm, DH could not access the site to book a ticket for the train from New Delhi to Bengaluru, which began operations on May 14.
“The data pertaining to many trains were not loaded at all until 7 pm. Even for the Bengaluru-Delhi trains, bookings for only two days were open,” said Mysuru-based railway activist Yogendra Swamy.
By 8 pm, tickets to Delhi were sold out for all the days till May 17, with many users questioning the officials. “We are unable to even search for the trains between the allowed stations and you guys are saying that tickets got sold out. Just thinking, is just opened up only for Media people,” Sandeep Kalaskar tweeted.
By late evening, Twitter’s India trend put IRCTC in fourth place with nearly 14,000 people speaking about the issue. Many posted screenshots of the app page that either showed that tickets were sold out or that the train was not available.
An official in IRCTC's head office in Delhi suspected that huge traffic to the website may have caused it to crash. "We are not sure whether it is due to a surge in the number of visitors or if there is another problem. The website has handled a large amount of traffic earlier," he said.
The official said not all visitors were coming to the website for ticket bookings. "The news that Railways are running special trains may have made many to check for booking availability and refunds, leading to crashes," he said.
By 9.15 pm, approximately 30,000 PNRs had been generated and reservations issued to more than 54,000 passengers.