IRCTC said users may have experienced delays on Tuesday, November 10, amid a surge in Diwali and Chhath Puja bookings. The disruption occurred from morning until afternoon and was caused by a high number of simultaneous login attempts, as noted in the IRCTC statement.

Users were met with the banner 'We are experiencing high load – Please retry', which halted both PNR status checks and ticket bookings. Northern India and Bihar saw the biggest impact, as did passengers trying to book special festive-season trains. The portal remained online, but response times spiked.

Nearly 89% of all reserved tickets are sold online, and from June 2025 to June 2026 a total of 65.08 crore tickets were booked through PRS. The outage reflects ongoing problems with the Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGET) system, launched in 2014 and now undergoing major upgrades to its infrastructure, servers, storage, networking and software.

IRCTC said services have returned to normal and that it is working to strengthen systems for future peak periods. The company received complaints on X about access issues during the outage.