IRCTC records highest-ever single-day booking of over 20 lakh tickets
New Delhi, Sept 11 (TNT): The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) recorded its highest-ever single-day booking of 20,06,353 tickets on September 7, amid heightened demand during the festive season, the corporation said in a press release on Sunday.
The record booking was attributed to continuous upgrades to the rail ticket booking system, including the introduction of a new user interface beta version from July 15, 2026.
At present, around 89 per cent of reserved tickets are booked online, it said.
The NGeT (Next Generation e-Ticketing) system again handled a high volume of bookings on September 8, when 19,50,699 tickets were booked.
The figure was higher than the previous festive-season single-day record of 18,40,203 tickets registered on August 19, 2025.
According to IRCTC, only 8.43 per cent to 14.14 per cent of daily bookings are completed during the first hour of the booking window, between 8 am and 9 am, while more than 85 per cent of bookings take place later in the day. The first 15 minutes, from 8 am to 8.15 am, consistently witness the highest booking volumes due to peak concurrent demand.
The corporation said the capacity of the NGeT ecosystem had been enhanced to approximately double through the induction of new servers, along with software optimisation and architectural improvements.
The new user interface, introduced in July, provides a more structured presentation of information and allows passengers to view availability across multiple classes, including Sleeper, AC 3 Tier and AC 2 Tier, on a single screen, reducing navigation time during booking.
IRCTC also said its anti-bot measures had helped mitigate 55-65 per cent of malicious bot traffic in recent months, while deployment of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) had reduced the load on the NGeT system.
Its network security team was also taking action against fake websites and mobile applications impersonating IRCTC.
All authorised ticketing agents, including YTSKs, RTSAs and IRCTC agents, are prohibited from booking Advance Reservation Period (ARP) tickets during the first 10 minutes of the booking window, from 8 am to 8.10 am.
Only Aadhaar-authenticated users are permitted to book tickets during the opening ARP window, a measure effective from October 12, 2025.
As part of measures against misuse, 3.04 crore user IDs have been deactivated, while 6.33 crore IDs have been placed under revalidation.
Besides, 16,041 suspicious email domains were blocked and 592 complaints covering 4.21 lakh suspicious PNRs were lodged on the Cyber Crime Portal.
IRCTC said that despite exceptionally high concurrent demand, there had been no failure or outage of the NGeT platform, which remained operational while processing a large volume of simultaneous booking requests.
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