New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website and mobile application, widely used for online railway ticket bookings, suffered a major outage on Friday, disrupting services for thousands of passengers just days before Diwali.

According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, more than 5,800 users reported problems accessing the service or completing bookings. Many travellers took to social media to complain that the website was either not loading or crashing midway through the ticketing process.

As of Friday afternoon, the IRCTC website remained inaccessible, displaying error messages for most users attempting to log in or search for trains. The mobile app was also reported to be unresponsiv...