The online railway ticket booking portal of Indian Railways was unavailable for bookings following a failure of the main server of Central Railway Information Systems at Delhi.
The website of Indian Railway Catering Catering (https://www.irctc.co.in), which provides ticket booking facility was shutdown for 13 hours. The shutdown led to long queues at booking counters at railway stations.
IRCTC officials said that the booking portal was made available for passengers at 1 pm on Thursday. However, the online ticket booking facility for authorised agents of IRCTC continues to remain unavailable. According to sources in IRCTC Mumbai, the system was restored at 12.30 pm, however, it soon crashed again.
Officials said that online booking system was being again reopened to public in a phased manner and by Thursday evening the entire system will be fully operational.
IRCTC's online ticket booking facility accounts for 45 per cent of the total tickets that are sold by Indian railways. On an average about 1000 tickets are booked in a minute across India through the online facility.
