As new IRCTC site stumbles under Diwali rush, Congress mocks Vaishnaw

The Congress on Wednesday, 9 September took a swipe at railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw over the revamped IRCTC website, amid renewed complaints from passengers that the platform is struggling during peak booking hours.

In a video post on social media, the party wrote one line of accompanying Hindi text to say, 'He can only make reels', referring to Vaishnaw's penchant for frequently posting social media reels.

The attack comes days after the start of Diwali 2026 bookings, when passengers reported that the IRCTC website, its new beta version and the RailOne app were hit by high-load problems around the 8.00 am opening of reservations. The problems reportedly persisted for about 50 minutes on Monday and Tuesday, with users complaining that they were unable to complete bookings and that many trains quickly moved to the waitlist.

The episode is particularly embarrassing for Vaishnaw because the new IRCTC website was launched after he personally intervened following complaints from students at MNIT Jaipur. During an interaction in June, students flagged problems with the existing platform, including slow speeds, CAPTCHA hurdles and crashes during Tatkal bookings. Vaishnaw then promised that a revamped website would be ready by 15 July.

The beta version was launched as promised. The Railways said it addressed several of the old platform's problems, including unnecessary CAPTCHAs and pop-ups, while making seat availability easier to view, reducing booking steps and allowing passengers to save details for repeat bookings. The government also said the new platform was being integrated with a revamped Passenger Reservation Engine.

The new system was billed as a substantial technological upgrade. The revamped website was designed to handle more than 1.5 lakh ticket bookings a minute, compared with around 32,000 on the old platform, according to India Today.

The recent problems, however, suggest that the most difficult test remains the enormous surge in demand at the precise moment bookings open. Passengers have reported high-load messages, failed payments and difficulty completing reservations, with some saying they could not even secure waitlisted tickets. User reports on Reddit also describe payment verification failures after money was debited.

The Railways has previously maintained that IRCTC's overall uptime is extremely high — it reported 99.98 per cent uptime between April and October 2025 — while attributing some booking difficulties to bots, suspicious accounts and attempts to manipulate the reservation system.