Applicants from more than 170 countries have struggled for weeks to complete India’s normally efficient e-Visa application, with screens freezing during passport-scan uploads and family-member additions. On 2 February, a senior Ministry of Home Affairs official confirmed to Travel and Tour World that the National Informatics Centre will migrate the indianvisaonline.gov.in platform to new servers during a scheduled outage in mid-February.
The surge follows New Delhi’s December decision to extend e-Visa eligibility to an additional 166 nations. Daily traffic has jumped from an average 35,000 sessions to nearly 120,000, overwhelming legacy infrastructure. Although approvals still arrive within 24 hours once an application is submitted, many would-be visitors report spending several hours refreshing pages or resorting to obscure browsers to beat time-outs.
For travelers who would rather not wrestle with the glitch-prone portal, visa facilitation specialists like VisaHQ can step in. Through its dedicated India page (https://www.visahq.com/india/), the service pre-screens documents, schedules submissions during low-traffic windows and tracks approvals in real time, reducing the risk of errors and last-minute surprises for both leisure and corporate clients.
![Persistent glitches on India’s e-Visa portal spark government server upgrade plan]()
Tour operators fear the friction could dent India’s peak spring-summer conference and wedding season. Industry body FAITH estimates potential revenue losses of up to ₹180 crore if the bottleneck persists through March. Corporate mobility managers are advising executives to file applications outside peak evening hours, keep photo/ID files below 200 kB and avoid multiple logins.
The Home Ministry says the mid-February migration will quintuple processing capacity, introduce autosave functionality and add a status-tracker chatbot. During the 6-hour cut-over (tentatively 02:00-08:00 IST on 17 February), no new applications will be accepted; airlines have been instructed to honour existing e-Visa approvals and to warn passengers of the blackout.
Until the upgrade is complete, travellers with urgent trips can still apply for a physical visa through Indian missions, but processing times average seven working days. Mobility teams should build additional lead time into travel plans and inform relocating employees of potential delays.
The surge follows New Delhi’s December decision to extend e-Visa eligibility to an additional 166 nations. Daily traffic has jumped from an average 35,000 sessions to nearly 120,000, overwhelming legacy infrastructure. Although approvals still arrive within 24 hours once an application is submitted, many would-be visitors report spending several hours refreshing pages or resorting to obscure browsers to beat time-outs.
For travelers who would rather not wrestle with the glitch-prone portal, visa facilitation specialists like VisaHQ can step in. Through its dedicated India page (https://www.visahq.com/india/), the service pre-screens documents, schedules submissions during low-traffic windows and tracks approvals in real time, reducing the risk of errors and last-minute surprises for both leisure and corporate clients.
Tour operators fear the friction could dent India’s peak spring-summer conference and wedding season. Industry body FAITH estimates potential revenue losses of up to ₹180 crore if the bottleneck persists through March. Corporate mobility managers are advising executives to file applications outside peak evening hours, keep photo/ID files below 200 kB and avoid multiple logins.
The Home Ministry says the mid-February migration will quintuple processing capacity, introduce autosave functionality and add a status-tracker chatbot. During the 6-hour cut-over (tentatively 02:00-08:00 IST on 17 February), no new applications will be accepted; airlines have been instructed to honour existing e-Visa approvals and to warn passengers of the blackout.
Until the upgrade is complete, travellers with urgent trips can still apply for a physical visa through Indian missions, but processing times average seven working days. Mobility teams should build additional lead time into travel plans and inform relocating employees of potential delays.
