Title - IRCTC website overloaded and crashed for two hours

IRCTC website got crashed today due too much load. Railway says that as much as 14000 tickets can be booked in one minute from the website but today due to deepavali rush the number touched 17000 which was way above the line to handle. Also there is a limit of queries made to website that it can answer every second, which is 3000 but today the scales tipped upto 4000 which accounted for server overloading, followed by unresponsive website.

It took two hours to make website back alive on the internet. A total of 54% of total tickets sold by railway are booked from IRCTC and atleast and 4lakhs of people come visit everyday during tatkal hours. This number too has gone up significantly due to Diwali rush. Apart from this railway has introduced several trains to try to remove the extra rush of passengers which has added up number of trains significantly and had also added up number of queries.

Recently the bandwidth of the website has been increased to two fold to handle the ticket booking during tatkal hours from 7200 per minute to 14000 per minute. On an average daily 5 to 6 lakhs tickets are booked through IRCTC. These are some serious numbers to handle and railway is trying hard to keep up the pace but instant rush always add up to the problem.