LAHORE: A large number of people seeking Pakistan Railways’ tickets online for various destinations faced hours-long hardship on Monday when the link of the train service’s reservation system downed.

The problem occurred after the system of National Telecom Corporation (NTC) — the country’s official information and communication technology services provider — suddenly stopped working.

However, the authorities concerned claimed to have restored the system after four-and-a-half hours, Dawn learnt.

“Our online reservation is linked with the NTC system that downed due to technical glitch. It downed at 2:45pm and finally it resumed operation at about 7:15pm. But we started informing the public at large about this issue through our information offices, media, social media etc,” PR’s Chief Executive Officer Arshad Islam explained when contacted by Dawn.

“The system downs due to online traffic. You can take it like motorway; when you see that the traffic flow is slow, you must believe that number of vehicles is more than the required ones leading to choking off the traffic,” he added.

On Jan 27, 2021, the PR’s system of e-ticketing and financial and human resources had collapsed, leaving 60 online reservation offices disconnected from main servers amid fear of loss of data. However, the then PR administration succeeded in restoring the online seat reservation system by using the host server of NTC. Later, it also recovered the entire data by using other applications and servers.

In June 2020, the PR management led by the then minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad sacked PR’s IT director, who was hired about six months ago after showing the door to the entire team of IT experts employed during the tenure of the former minister (a senior PML-N leader).

The director had been removed on the pretext of bad performance. However, according to sources, the move was politically motivated that badly affected the railways IT department operation.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2023