The site and app of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) went down on Thursday. Many passengers complained on social media that they were unable to book tickets. Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, has also shown a jump in reports of the site being down.

IRCTC has not yet responded to this major outage. On opening the IRCTC app, an error pop-up of 'unable to act due to maintenance activity' is visible. At the same time, a message of 'Sorry!!! Please try again!!' is coming on the IRCTC site.

Many users on social media are expressing strong displeasure over this outage. A user tagged the Railway Minister and Railway Minister and said, 'IRCTC site crashes at 10 am and when it opens, all the Tatkal tickets are booked. What is this if not a scam.'

Another user wrote, 'India reached the moon, but the Indian Railways ticket booking app cannot handle Tatkal booking without crashing. It's 2024, and having a stable server should not be rocket science!'

The site went down for the second time in a month.

The IRCTC site was down for an hour on 9 December as well. The reason for that was also cited maintenance by the e-ticketing platform. Today's problem has upset the passengers who were trying to book Tatkal tickets. These can be booked a day before the train leaves the originating station. AC class booking starts at 10 am and non-AC class booking starts at 11 am.

IRCTC is currently working on a super app. In this, all the apps related to railways will be combined to form one app. This will give more convenience to the passengers and they will be able to do things like ticket booking and train tracking from a single app. The site going down is also being linked to the super app process.

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