IRCTC Down: PNR Status Not Working on 24 Oct 2026

Short answer: on Saturday, 24 October 2026, Indian Railways' PNR enquiry service stopped answering. It failed on and off from about 9:00 AM IST and completely from about 3:45 PM IST. It was still down when we last checked at 8:10 PM IST. Your ticket is not affected: only the status lookup failed. For the current state, see our live IRCTC PNR status page.

What we saw

Every PNR check on RailTC asks Indian Railways for the live status, so we notice quickly when that service stops answering. Here is the timeline from our own checks:

• About 9:00 AM IST: checks start failing on and off. Indian Railways' PNR system answered slowly, returned HTTP 500 errors, or replied “Unable to process your request.”
• About 3:45 PM IST: every lookup fails. The home page of www.indianrail.gov.in still loaded, but every page under /enquiry/ (the PNR enquiry and its captcha) had its connection reset.
• 8:10 PM IST: still down. We checked the same PNR on other services: RailYatri showed “PNR status not available at the moment” and ConfirmTkt could not fetch it either.

What still worked

• Ticket booking on irctc.co.in loaded normally.
• Live train running status (NTES, enquiry.indianrail.gov.in) kept working, because it runs on a separate system. You can use RailTC's live train status to see where your train is.

What passengers should do when PNR status is down

1. Don't book a second ticket in a panic. Your booking, berth and waitlist position do not change when the status page is down.
2. Try again in 15–30 minutes. Our live status page shows when PNR checks are going through again.
3. Read the SMS from IRCTC. Chart and confirmation messages still reach the number on the ticket.
4. Call 139, Indian Railways' enquiry line, if you need the status urgently.
5. Report it. Email IRCTC customer care at [email protected] or use RailMadad. Our live status page has a ready-made message you can send from your own email or X account.
6. Once it's back, check your PNR on RailTC to see your confirmation chance.

Why does IRCTC say “Unable to process your request”?

That message comes from Indian Railways' own PNR system, not from your phone or your PNR number. It appears when the PNR servers are overloaded or partly down. On 24 October it was the first sign of the outage, hours before the PNR pages stopped loading completely. Wait 15–30 minutes and try again.

How to check PNR status when IRCTC is down

• SMS: send PNR <your 10-digit PNR> to 139.
• Call 139 and choose PNR enquiry.
• Your IRCTC SMS: chart-prepared and confirmation messages still reach the mobile number used for booking.

These run on Indian Railways' own systems too, so during a full outage they can also fail. Our live IRCTC status page shows when PNR enquiry is answering again.

What exactly failed (for the technically curious)

DNS, the network connection and the HTTPS handshake to www.indianrail.gov.in all worked, and its F5 BIG-IP load balancer answered the home page normally. Requests to the PNR application itself (anything under /enquiry/) were reset right after the handshake, which browsers show as ERR_CONNECTION_RESET. That pattern usually means the application servers behind the load balancer are unavailable. It is a problem on Indian Railways' side, which is why every PNR app was affected at the same time.

Is this the same as the nightly maintenance?

No. IRCTC switches off PNR enquiry every night from about 11:30 PM to 12:30 AM IST for maintenance. This outage happened in the middle of the day and lasted for hours.

RailTC is not affiliated with Indian Railways or IRCTC. This article reports what our own checks measured on 24 October 2026; it is not an official notice. We will update it when the service is back.