A huge number of people suffered as Bangladesh Railway’s website [eticket.railway.gov.bd] went down following resumption of the online ticket selling on Saturday today after a five-day break.
Many people had to throng rail stations and form long queues to get tickets.
The incident took place following the handover of the Integrated Ticketing System to a new joint venture company.
Officials of the joint venture of Shohoz Limited, Synesis IT Limited and Vincen Consultancy Pvt Limited said that the website went down following a huge number of hits a time.
Bangladesh Railway officials said that the situation would improve by tonight while it would take few days to back to normality.
Online tickets are, however, now available only on eticket.railway.gov.bd portal and on the mobile app — Rail Sheba.
Earlier, the railway sold tickets of all trains manually for five days in March 20–25 prior to the handover of the Integrated Ticketing System to the new joint venture company.
n February 15, the railway signed a contract with Shohoz-Synesis-Vincen JV to ‘more effectively’ operate the ticketing system for five years from March 26.
The previous vendor was CNS Limited.
No online tickets were available in the five days while all tickets were sold manually at ticket counters railway stations.
Currently, railway sells about 90,000 tickets daily or about 27 lakh tickets monthly for 104 intercity trains from 77 stations while half of them are being sold at counters and the rest half through eticket.railway.gov.bd portal and Rail Sheba mobile app.
Railways ministry officials said that Rail Sheba mobile app was owned by the previous vendor CNS Limited and that was why this app would not be used anymore.
At 8:00am on Saturday, the railway began to sell half of the train tickets at counters at stations and the rest half online at eticket.railway.gov.bd portal.
Soon after that many complained that they could not access website.
As the situation did not improve, many of them went to rail stations, including Kamalapur.
Huge crowd of people were seen there almost whole day.
Shohoz Ltd public relations manager Farhat Ahmed told New Age that some of the tickets were sold after opening of the website at 8:00am.
‘After that, we got several lakh of hits and that caused the website to go down,’ he said.
He attributed the situation to hits by curious people, people for buying tickets and even people with possible bad intentions to attack the system.
He said that they were working on it and were not sure when the website would work.
Bangladesh Railway director for public relations Nahid Hasan Khan said that earlier 30–40 lakh people were registered on the website.
‘From Saturday, people who are accessing the portal have to register again which put pressure on the server,’ he said.
He said that hopefully the situation would improve by tonight and it would take few more days for a normal situation.
He said that they were working for introducing new mobile app for ticketing.
‘We will announce it soon,’ he added.
On Friday evening, the railway started to issue tickets for all intercity trains by Railway’s Integrated Ticketing System at the counters of 77 stations across the country.
