Several government websites experienced outages on Tuesday, December 31, 2024, due to a power failure at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) data centre in Shastri Park, Northeast Delhi, according to sources. Although the power was restored, the websites remained offline until 7:30 p.m.
Coinciding with the New Year travel rush, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website also went down, disrupting tatkal ticket bookings for trains departing on January 1.
This marked the second recent outage for the IRCTC site, following technical issues during the tatkal booking period on December 26, when the Next Generation E-ticketing system was unavailable between 10:01–10:40 a.m. and 10:51–11:23 a.m. Officials did not immediately comment on Tuesday's outage. Users attempting to book tickets encountered maintenance messages, leading to frustration among passengers, especially during peak travel times.
ï‚· Incident: Multiple government websites went offline due to a power outage at the NIC’s data centre in Delhi on December 31, 2024. Resolution of the power issue occurred, but some sites remained down until late evening.
ï‚· Context: Outage affected critical travel bookings on the IRCTC website, which coincided with the New Year's travel rush. This follows a prior outage on December 26.
ï‚· Details of Impact: Government websites from various ministries (e.g., DoT, MEA, PIB, MoHFW, MoL) were affected. Some recovered partially by 7:30 p.m., while others remained inaccessible.
ï‚· Unresolved Issues: Officials did not provide comments on the IRCTC outage, and some sites continued to display error messages.
Among the affected government websites were those of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Press Information Bureau (PIB), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and Ministry of Labour (MoL). While the DoT and MEA sites were restored by 7:30 p.m., others, including the PIB and MoL portals, continued to display error messages or remain inaccessible at press time.
