KUALA LUMPUR: Keretapi Tanah Melayu Bhd (KTMB) has apologised for a technical glitch in its online ticketing system which disrupted the first day of its advanced tickets sales on Monday.
Its chief executive officer, Datuk Kamarulzaman Zainal, said the high volume of customers trying to purchase tickets had caused a disruption to its online ticket server.
“We usually sell an average of 12,000 tickets for 40 trains in a day.
“Yesterday, we had about 30,000 transactions since the sale began at 8.30am,” he said, adding that the server also registered 400,000 visitors yesterday, causing further technical issues.
Speaking at a press conference at the KL Sentral Station here today, he said KTMB has taken several immediate measures to address the issue, first by increasing internet bandwidth capacity from 100Mbps to 200Mbps.
“Secondly, we have increased the server capacity of the Centralised Processing Unit,” he said.
Kamarulzaman said that with the upgrade, waiting time for online ticket purchase will be reduced significantly, from 30 minutes to two minutes.
KTMB is currently selling 1.2 million tickets for the Electric Train Service (ETS) and inter-city trains for the traveling period between Dec 1 and Feb 29 next year. As of 10pm yesterday, KTMB managed to sell 57,441 tickets.
He said after rectifying the technical problem, a total of 77,000 tickets were sold.
“We are also trying to change the current system to a more stable one, in line with KTMB’s digitalisation programme which is expected to be ready by the third quarter of next year,” he said.
Kamarulzaman said the advance ticket sales period was introduced to facilitate planning for those intending to travel during the school holiday, Christmas and the Chinese New Year festive periods.
On the glitches, Kamarulzaman said the company will carry out a thorough investigation.
“We want to (determine) if there was any… element of hacking. Let’s give about two weeks for the investigation to complete. KTMB might also lodge a police report (if elements of sabotage are uncovered),” he said.
Tickets are available for purchase at all KTMB counters in Peninsular Malaysia, online at www.ktmb.com.my and the Mobticket app.
Some passengers at the Kuala Lumpur Sentral Station said that they had to wait in queue for over two hours for tickets during the disruption yesterday.
Ibrahim Long, 63, said KTMB should seriously look into ways to improve the ticket purchasing process.
“Buying train tickets online should be easy for everybody,” he said.
Another traveller, Raj Kumar, 44, urged KTMB to have a better contingency plan in preparation for huge online traffic volume.
“The process should have been smoother and there is also a need to have priority lanes for the disabled and senior citizens at the ticketing booths,” he said.
Another traveller, Chan Cheng Tuan, said customer service staff should be more aware of the waiting time and reach out to disabled customers.
Chan also said that she could not access the Mobticket application since early Tuesday.