Here’s why passengers faced trouble to buy train tickets online Saturday

After five days of only manual ticket sales, Bangladesh Railways resumed computer-based digitised ticket sales from stations on 25 March and online from 26 March morning.

Previously, Computer Networking System (CNS) Limited managed the ticket purchasing site from 2007 – 2022. Shohoz, an e-ticketing platform, got the new deal to manage the online ticketing. Shohoz had to take over responsibility of software and hardware in only 21 business days from signing of the contract.

Shohoz deployed its own software solution in all 77 stations all over Bangladesh from 6pm on 25 March for ticket sales. From 6pm to midnight on the day, around 50k seats were sold from stations, and on 26 March full day, station-based sales were around 100k seats. On Sunday, around 7,000 online tickets have been successfully sold from the new railway website from 8am to 12pm.

Online site was launched on 26 March morning. Immediately after the new site was launched by Shohoz, it started getting huge visitors. Only some passengers could buy the tickets and later it was unavailable for many others.

"The site had 22 lakh hits per minute on Saturday, mostly from abroad. We suspect it was a cyber-attack as no one from abroad is supposed to browse the site for purchasing a train ticket for travelling inside the country," said Farhat Ahmed, Public Relations Manager at Shohoz.

However, due to this huge traffic on the website many passengers were unable to access the site properly and buy tickets. They also faced difficulties in getting OTPs, loading websites and encountered server issues.

After a few hours of this glitch the site finally became functional and currently is running smoothly.

Computer Networking System (CNS) Limited, an ICT service provider, has been managing the software and network used for selling train tickets online and at 77 stations since 2007 and their contract ended on 20 March this year.

So, a new tender was issued and Shohoz.com, owned and operated by Shohoz Limited, won it. A contract was inked in this regard on 15 February, said Railways Minister Nurul Islam Sujan.

As per tender, Shohoz will deploy an integrated solution in 18 months. Shohoz will provide the service for the next five years.