Rail website crashes after millions of hits on Saturday

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website — the online ticket booking portal of the Indian Railways — almost crashed on Saturday. This happened as around a million people hit the website on average every hour, soon after the booking window opened in the morning. IRCTC said the reason was the new ticket reservation policy that came into effect on Saturday. As per the new policy, passengers can book their tickets four months in advance from the date of journey.“Around a million people hit the website to get rail tickets booked for their summer holidays, causing a temporary shutdown of the website,” said a senior IRCTC official. The temporary shutdown caused huge inconvenience to passengers.According to an IRCTC spokesperson, the website can successfully handle only 50,000 to 60,000 transactions in an hour, whereas two lakh people hit the website every hour on a normal day.“We can book over 1,000 tickets in a minute. There are congestions during normal days also, but during the festive season it gets overclogged. something similar happened on Saturday, when the website almost crashed due to heavy traffic,” the spokesperson added.The congestion, which continued on Sunday, slowed down the site and made transactions difficult.The recently launched IRCTC mobile application for train booking has also been giving passengers a harrowing time.