New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has set a new record for online train ticket bookings, with 20,06,353 tickets sold on September 7, 2026, the highest single-day figure ever recorded …

New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has set a new record for online train ticket bookings, with 20,06,353 tickets sold on September 7, 2026, the highest single-day figure ever recorded by the platform.The surge came as the advanced reservation period (ARP) opened for the festive season. With Diwali falling on November 8, 2026, and Indian Railways having shortened the advance booking window from 120 days to 60 days, demand spiked sharply this week. The following day, September 8, saw another strong performance, with 19,50,699 tickets booked, a statement said.Online bookings now account for about 89 per cent of all reserved tickets on the Indian Railways network. Last year’s festive-season peak stood at 18,40,203 tickets in a single day.Indian Railways plans four-laning of 11,000-km high-density network IRCTC attributed the record to major capacity upgrades. A refresh of the Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) system roughly doubled overall infrastructure capacity through new servers, software optimisation and architectural improvements. The platform has handled between 1.33 crore and 1.74 crore logins on peak ARP opening days while processing 17–20 lakh bookings, the statement said.Additional measures have helped manage the load. A beta version of a redesigned user interface, rolled out from July 15, 2026, features a modern layout influenced by design trends such as glassmorphism. It displays availability across classes (Sleeper, AC 3 Tier, AC 2 Tier and others) on a single screen to simplify comparisons.IRCTC has also deployed anti-BOT tools that reduced malicious traffic by 55–65 per cent in recent months, along with a content delivery network (CDN) to ease pressure on the core system. Only Aadhaar-authenticated users can book during the opening ARP window, and authorised agents are barred from booking in the first 10 minutes (8:00–8:10 am).Data shows that the first 15 minutes of the booking window still see the highest concurrent demand, though more than 85 per cent of daily bookings occur later in the day.To curb misuse, IRCTC has deactivated 3.04 crore user IDs, placed 6.33 crore IDs under revalidation, blocked 16,041 suspicious email domains and filed 592 cybercrime complaints covering 4.21 lakh suspicious PNRs, the statement added.

Source: Deccan Herald