Things to do while the Indian Railways website is down

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Things to do while the Indian Railways website is down

Go out. Stretch. Make tea.
Hit Reload over and over again, hoping to see something other than “communication failure.”
Get paranoid and buy a bus ticket.
Swear at the moron ticket booking agency that bought a sleeper class ticket waitlisted at 241, when they were clearly instructed to get a higher class ticket if sleeper wasn’t available.
Wonder what on earth the babus were thinking, running a website that only operates 9:30 AM to 6 PM. Even websites need to shut shop and go home for the evening? Websites are not allowed to provide better service, since that would put human jobs at risk?

grecianurn — Jan 23, 2005 11:29:32 AM — # ↩

a website that only operates 9:30 AM to 6 PM

That's seriously funny.
- harish_an — Jan 24, 2005 2:48:33 AM — # ↩
  
  even i thought so... but guess thats to make sure the onliners dont have an extra edge in addition to what they have...over the poor ones who stand in the line ...
beerbal — Jan 23, 2005 11:51:20 AM — # ↩

5

Might have something to do with ensuring parity between online and in-line customers.
- madhav — Jan 24, 2005 11:55:32 AM — # ↩
  
  I think that's the reason. irctc doesn't close at 5, by the way. I think it's on till 8 or 10pm.
  - Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jan 24, 2005 1:19:40 PM — # ↩
    
    Right, I assumed 9:30 to 6 because that's regular office timings. IAC, it started working for me yesterday at 9 AM.
latelyontime — Jan 23, 2005 4:13:18 PM — # ↩

ha ha ha ha....:))
ma7ur — Jan 23, 2005 4:25:17 PM — # ↩

Websites are not allowed to provide better service, since that would put human jobs at risk?

LOL!
satyap — Jan 23, 2005 6:03:03 PM — # ↩

Unfortunately, that thinking might be what's behind it. Or they're simply running an unstable web site on an unstable system.

I know one train forum that shut down over Christmas, claiming a break for employees. Makes me wonder if they had to type the posts into web pages by hand or something. Everyone was directed to go to other forums. I wonder, didn't other forums also need to close down?

Idjitheads.
mannu — Jan 23, 2005 6:16:08 PM — # ↩

Believe me I had a hard time booking my return ticket to Bangalore earlier this week. I had to enter the name of the station manually (as opposed to looking it up from the list), and I had to reload the pages a few times before I finally got to the payment page. Here, I was hoping it didn't fail, because I was no way going to reload a payment page (lest it make the payment twice!). Thankfully I got through. Persistence is the key. And have faith in God.
dhempe — Jan 23, 2005 7:51:15 PM — # ↩

IRCTC.co.in lets you book tickets till 10pm.
harish_an — Jan 24, 2005 2:50:49 AM — # ↩

let me know if you believe in the power of corruption and dont mind paying a little extra for an urgent ticket... can put you on with a guy in bangalore who can do just that... there is this interesting concept called emergency quota :)
rishiseth — Jan 26, 2005 12:34:44 PM — # ↩

irctc is just a front-app for the actual Railways Passenger Reservation System, designed and implemented in late 80's. AFAIK, the PRS needs to shut down at the end of the day to enable backups, which in turn could be because: a, they still use backup technologies of 80's, or b, the data captured is indeed huge, or c, both of these.