IRCTC to upgrade ticket booking system to reduce disruptions during peak hours

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is set to enhance its ticket booking system with the aim of minimizing technical issues during high traffic periods and enhancing the overall online booking experience. This upgrade is part of a larger initiative to bolster system stability, handle heavy website traffic, and streamline the ticket booking process.

Nearly 89% of reserved train tickets are now purchased online, with 65.08 crore reserved tickets booked through the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) between June 2025 and June 2026, of which 57.90 crore were completed online. However, during peak booking hours, such as the opening of the Advance Reservation Period (ARP) at 8 am and Tatkal booking at 10 am for AC class and 11 am for non-AC class, the IRCTC website has occasionally experienced disruptions due to heavy traffic.

To mitigate such issues, IRCTC is undertaking upgrades to its Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGET) system, which was introduced in 2014 to augment online ticket booking capacity and passenger satisfaction. IRCTC has announced two significant upgrades. The first is an NGET infrastructure upgrade, involving improvements to servers, storage, networking, and software. This upgrade aims to elevate the current capacity of ticket bookings, which has reached approximately 37,000 per minute, to over 1 lakh per minute.

The second upgrade involves an active-active disaster recovery system, designed to maintain uninterrupted service even if one system faces an outage. This is particularly crucial during peak booking periods, as a mere one or two-minute disruption can significantly impact passengers. IRCTC plans to implement this system, potentially at the Secunderabad data center.

The IRCTC beta website, launched on July 15, has already introduced several enhancements, including fewer CAPTCHAs and pop-ups, seamless seat availability across all classes, a simplified checkout process, and the ability to save passenger details for quicker repeat bookings. Furthermore, IRCTC is bolstering its defenses against unauthorized agents attempting to overload the website during peak hours.

The corporation is employing Akamai for bot mitigation and content delivery, and implementing longer idle time limits for agents to reduce the likelihood of unauthorized activity.