Snags in TTD website irk devotees

Hyderabad: Technical snags in the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) online booking website for over one-and-half hours on Friday left many devotees disappointed as many could not book slots for darshan of Lord Sri Venkateswara. At 9 am on Friday, the TTD released the quota for booking Special Entry Darshan (SED) tickets scheduled for October. However, […]

Hyderabad: Technical snags in the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) online booking website for over one-and-half hours on Friday left many devotees disappointed as many could not book slots for darshan of Lord Sri Venkateswara. At 9 am on Friday, the TTD released the quota for booking Special Entry Darshan (SED) tickets scheduled for October. However, the website developed technical snags within minutes. TTD officials said it was due to the heavy load on the system.

Briefing media persons at Tirumala, TTD Executive Officer (EO) AV Dharma Reddy said there were multiple factors for technical snags in the system. It was a newly developed application and there was sudden increase in the load, resulting in some technical issues till 10.30 AM, he said.

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The Jio, TCS and TTD IT teams together addressed the technical issue within and services resumed at around 10.30 AM. About 5.5 lakh users tried to book the tickets and more than one crore hits were received on the TTD Booking portal, a TTD press release said.

“The bookings were smooth and users experienced smooth booking process. Within one hour, 2. 4 lakh tickets were booked successfully and the total hits touched the one crore mark today” said Dharma Reddy.

Following complaints of frequent technical issues from pilgrims while booking SED booking during the months of August and September, the TTD IT wing with the help of TCS, explored all technical solutions to overcome performance issues. The team explored many alternatives including Amazon, Jio, Bookmyshow, Abhibus etc, which has a powerful Cloud Management System.

Jio was selected as the management had come forward to address the technical issue free of cost. As a service to Lord Venkateswara Swamy, the Jio management had taken up the exercise as a challenge to meet the expectations of the pilgrim in providing best possible booking experiences, the TTD EO said.

Deploying a 30-member highly qualified technical team, which worked round the clock for the past 22 days, JIO developed a new web portal and made it ready for releasing the SED quota on Friday. The app developed was thoroughly tested to ensure security and flawless performance and new payment gateways were introduced. Jio provided the required cloud infrastructure, including software development worth Rs. 3 crore for free to TTD, he said.

In the new system, the pilgrims were redirected to the Jiomart sub-domain from tirupatibalaiji.ap.gov.in website. The sub-domain under the TTD name could not be created due to time and technical constraints. From next month’s release onwards, jiomart would not appear and the domain name will be tirupaitbalaji.ap.gov.in only, Dharma Reddy assured.

TTD appealed to devotees not to get carried away by any malicious campaign by vested elements, he added.

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