The site and app of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) experienced a major outage on Thursday, December 26, leaving many passengers unable to book Tatkal tickets. Several users took to social media to complain about the issue. Outrage tracking Downdetector.com also reported a spike in complaints regarding the site being down.
IRCTC has yet to provide an official response to the outage. Users attempting to access the IRCTC app and official website encountered an error pop-up stating, "Unable to perform action due to maintenance activity." Meanwhile, the IRCTC website displayed the message, "Sorry!!! Please Try Again!!"
Social media users expressed their frustration over the outage. One user tagged the Railway Minister and wrote, "It is 10:11am ... 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... "
Another user commented, "Is anyone working on this ?? Now everything is showing NOT AVAILABLE. While tickets are getting booked at Railway stations..Is the IT support team is not competent to run the website smoothly??"
Notably, IRCTC's site also experienced downtime for about an hour on 9 December, reportedly due to maintenance. Today’s outage particularly affected passengers attempting to book Tatkal tickets. Tatkal bookings open one day prior to the train's departure, with AC class bookings starting at 10 am and non-AC class bookings beginning at 11 am.