Server glitch disrupts Eid train ticket sales

News Desk :
People trying to book tickets on the second day of online train ticket sales for Eid-ul-Fitr, one of the largest festivals for Muslims in Bangladesh, have run into widespread server issues.
Ticket sales began at 8 am on Saturday, but many people were not able to access the Shohoz site despite waiting for hours. The users who managed to get to the site still ran into technical problems and were unable to pay after selecting their tickets.
Most tickets were already booked shortly after 8 pm, passengers said. Many took to social media to express their anger over the many problems, reports bdnews24.com
“No issue has been found in the process of selling Eid tickets. Passengers faced a problem as some automatic private

IPs were trying to get access to the server since the morning,” said Shohoz-Synesis-Vincen JV, the company responsible for the ticketing system.
Rail authorities launched the service with the sale of advance train tickets for Apr 17. Tickets for Apr 18 went on sale on Saturday.
The railway authorities said they had launched the e-ticketing system because of difficulties faced by passengers due to black-market sales and crowds at the stations. But passengers have expressed the same concerns now as they were unable to get the tickets after waiting for many hours.
Monirul Islam, a bank official who was seeking tickets for the Kurigram Express Train, said he was not able to buy tickets after trying from both a mobile phone and a laptop for two hours in the morning.
“I was able to check the ticket selection option after login but could not click the purchase option due to a ‘virtual glitch’ affecting the system. I am not sure if the site was hacked.”
Kazi Shamim Hasan, who works at a private development organisation in Cox’s Bazar, said he logged in to the site at 7:50 am to buy tickets for a Tangail-bound train from Dhaka and suffered a long wait.
Second day of Eid train ticket sales runs into server glitches
“The site took a long time to select the ticket. After selecting the ticket, the next option, ‘continue purchase’, was not working at all. The payment option took me to a different page where I ended up in ‘waiting’. A ‘timeout’ option was frequently showing up. It took one and a half hours to buy three tickets.”
Md Razzak, another passenger who tried to buy tickets for Kurigram-bound trains from three different devices, said he was stuck at the purchase option for two hours.
“Do I need to sit in front of my laptop to get access to the next step until Iftar?” he asked.
Another passenger named Touhidul Islam wrote on Facebook that he failed to secure his ticket even after completing the purchase. Many people like Touhidul reported server issues and complications while buying tickets online on a Facebook page named ‘Bangladesh Railway Helpline’.
“I got access to the site at 8 am and selected seat No. 27 at NEO compartment but a ‘virtual glitch’ affected the service at that moment. I later tried from a laptop using my father’s identity card but the ticket was booked by then. If the server is down, then where are these tickets going?”
Jubayer Ahmed, the vice president of Shohoz JV, said a total of 16,000 tickets from Dhaka to different destinations were sold until 1:15 pm on Saturday. More than 26,000 train tickets are being sold from the server per day.
“There was no issue on the server, the hits are still below capacity. The service was affected due to some automatic private IPs who were trying to get access to the site since the morning. It’s not hacking, but the issue has created queues on the server.”
“We are checking IPs manually for now and allowing only real IPs to get access to the server. We are trying our best to speed up the process by installing a filter application which will be able to remove machine-generated logins.”