Indian Railways’ ticketing portal went haywire on the eve of Chhath Puja 2025, with the IRCTC website and app crashing due to the flood of booking requests, leaving lakhs of domestic passengers stranded. This is the second major outage in a week, following another similar glitch before Diwali, adding to the frustration of users as they faced a terrifying error: “This site is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”
The glitch occurred around 10 am on October 25, coinciding with the Tatkal booking window and the peak of the festival season, when demand for trains to Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh is at its peak. DownDetector logged more than 180 complaints by noon, of which 51% were app access failures, 46% were website issues and 3% were ticket- issues. Outrage erupted on social media: “@IRCTCofficial, servers down during Tatkal—agents snatch seats and we are harassed!” One user wrote tagging Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav. Another lamented, “IRCTC app stuck on PIN verification for days—ruining Chhath plans.”
IRCTC’s silence on the timeline for restoring services is reminiscent of the Diwali incident, which was resolved just hours after servers were overloaded due to 12,000 special trains announced for festival routes. Officials urged to use the e-query portal for complaints, but did not provide details of any solution. As lakhs of people are drawn to the East during the four-day festival of Chhath—from the holy bath on October 25 to Usha Arghya on October 28—family reunions are at risk due to power outages.
Affected passengers turned to options like Paytm, ConfirmTicket and RailYatri for booking, however availability remained reduced. Critics have condemned the frequent accidents as a “scam in favor of agents” and have called for a server upgrade amid the railways’ ₹2.65 lakh crore capital expenditure. Accompanied by folk song tunes at stations, this digital derailment underlines the urgent need for resilient infrastructure in line with India’s rail renaissance. Passengers: Try again after 2 pm or visit the counter—Chhath spirit continues, despite disruptions.
