Passengers trying to book train tickets for Chhath Puja faced a frustrating morning on Tuesday as the IRCTC portal slowed to a crawl during peak hours. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation has now clarified that there was no outage — only login delays caused by an exceptional surge in traffic.
The trouble was worst during the 8 am Advance Reservation Period window, when thousands of users logged in simultaneously to book berths home for the festival. Passengers reported slow loading, login failures and failed payments on both the website and the mobile app, with particular anger from those trying to book Tatkal tickets.
Tracking website Downdetector registered 744 complaints by 11.12 am on Tuesday, several times the usual daily figure. Social media filled with screenshots of error pages and stalled payment screens, and some users reported that the IRCTC home page would not load at all during the peak hours.
IRCTC’s response was firm on one point: the portal never went down. In a statement on November 10, the corporation said the online reservation portal remained up and operational throughout, but performance was delayed by the high volume of concurrent logins. It stressed that the issues were temporary and that e-ticketing services across all channels have since returned to normal.
The surge was driven by the sheer scale of festive travel. Trains to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are facing enormous demand as lakhs of people head home for Chhath Puja, which runs from November 13 to 16. Railways says it is running thousands of special trains for the season, and platform ticket sales were temporarily suspended at major stations in Delhi and the National Capital Region to reduce congestion.
The episode is a familiar one. IRCTC’s systems strain almost every festival season, when booking windows open to millions of users at once. Engineers describe the pattern as a traffic spike cascading through overloaded servers — and passengers describe it, more simply, as the same failure every year.
For now, the advice for travellers is practical: book early, try the app as well as the website, and keep an eye on special train announcements. The portal is working again — but with Chhath just days away, the next rush is already building.
Railways officials say the demand surge is not a one-day phenomenon. With Diwali over and Chhath Puja approaching, the eastern corridors are expected to stay crowded through the weekend, and passengers travelling to Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh should plan for fully booked trains. The corporation has said it will continue to monitor load on its servers through the festive window.
