Bangladesh Railway has started selling tickets through its own website from 8 am on Saturday (March 26). Preparations were quite satisfactory after the change of service provider. As declared, on Independence Day, the railway authorities opened the opportunity to buy tickets online from their own domain. The work of selling tickets online started from 8 am under the management of Shohoz.com, a company with 15 years of online ticketing experience in Bangladesh. But in the first couple of hours, there was a disruption. In the first hour of the first day, the customers faced trouble to connect to OTP, website loading and server. From then until the time of writing this report, the web site was crippled.
At this time, the website of Bangladesh Railway is still showing the video of how to buy a ticket from the ‘Rail Service App’ created by the previous service provider- CNS Limited. However, no app has yet been launched for train tickets. After a one-week break, sales have just been started from the website. However, the victims are heating up the social media by stumbling at the beginning of the new journey.
In deed, the railway ticket website went down around 9:15 am on Saturday. Talking to Shohoz Authority about the fact that the website was not up and running even after 10 long hours, it was learned that 2.2 million hits per minute had been hit on the server before the 45,000 tickets allotted online while it was closed. And the most of these hits came from abroad. Developers are now working to prevent this unexpected ‘DDoS’ cyberattack. The authority expects to fix it all by Sunday.
According to CNS, the service is a joint venture of Shohoz-Synesys-Vincen JV and the software for operating the new ticketing system is ready in just 21 working days. Finally, the Shohoz authority succeeded in connecting 77 railway ticket counters online at 6 pm on March 25. by midnight, 41,000 tickets were sold digitally from the counters.
In this regard, the media spokesperson of Shohoz.com told Digibangla that it is unexpected that there will be 22 lakh hits per minute after the launch of the site. The big thing is that most of the hits have been from outside the country. Web developers are working relentlessly to solve this problem. Work is also underway to close the ‘road’ so that consumers do not fall prey to cyber criminals. However, despite the problem of buying tickets from the website, he claimed that digital tickets are being sold from 77 counters.