India e-Visa Portal Down or Unstable (2026): What Travelers Should Do

The short answer

India's official e-visa portal (indianvisaonline.gov.in) has been unstable since early 2026 and still is as of October 2026. The site is not gone — it loads in some regions on some days — but timeouts, SSL errors and crashes remain common. If you can't get through and your trip is urgent, the paper visa route (via an Indian embassy/consulate or visa centre) is the reliable fallback.

What happened: a timeline

Dec 2025 — India expanded e-visa eligibility to 166 additional nationalities. Daily sessions jumped from ~35,000 to nearly 120,000.
Jan-Feb 2026 — The old infrastructure buckled: frozen pages, CAPTCHA failures, random logouts, upload errors. Some applicants reported refreshing hundreds of times.
17 Feb 2026 — The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed the National Informatics Centre moved the portal to new servers during a planned outage (02:00–08:00 IST), promising 5× processing capacity.
Mar-Oct 2026 — Still degraded. DownOrNot has flagged "degraded service" for roughly 4 months; status checks return 200 from some regions (San Francisco, Singapore) but time out from others (London). Chinese travel agencies reported in early October 2026 that the self-service e-visa channel was "not yet restored".

What wicwic's daily monitoring sees

wicwic.com monitors 36 official entry-card and visa sites daily from Cloudflare's edge. For indianvisaonline.gov.in, our monitor has logged HTTP 525 (SSL handshake failure at the origin) on multiple days (e.g. 30 Sep and 6 Oct 2026), with the site recovering between episodes (1 Oct: normal 192 KB page). This matches the pattern above: the portal is not permanently down — it fails intermittently and regionally.

Symptoms you may see

Page never loads / times out after 30+ seconds
SSL errors ("secure connection failed" — HTTP 525 at the network level)
Freezes while uploading passport scans or adding family members
CAPTCHA never validating
Sudden logouts mid-application

The single most important warning: there is no official alternative site

indianvisaonline.gov.in is the only official channel for India e-visa. There is no second official domain. "Agent portals" that look official (similar logos, .com/.net/.org variants, "express e-visa" promises) are private agencies or scams — they charge fees on top of the official fee, and some never submit anything. If a site asks for payment before you have entered your application data on the official portal, leave.

What to try first (self-service)

Try off-peak hours: late night / early morning India time (IST 00:00–06:00) has the best success rate.
Keep passport scan and photo under 200 KB each — upload errors are a major failure point.
Use one browser tab only; avoid multiple simultaneous logins.
Try a different browser — users report success with fresh installs, DuckDuckGo, or Edge's IE mode.
If a page freezes, wait 1–2 minutes before refreshing — aggressive retries make it worse.
Check a third-party status page (e.g. downornot.net) before spending an hour fighting the site.

If it's urgent: paper visa

Apply via the Indian embassy/consulate or the official visa application centre in your country (in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou).
Typical processing: ~7 working days after in-person submission.
Budget example (China, Oct 2026, as reported by agencies): around ¥628 plus documents, with proof of funds (~¥100,000) sometimes requested.
Paper visa needs an appointment and in-person submission — plan 2–3 weeks of total lead time.

Related: the Su-Swagatam arrival card runs on the same domain

India's Su-Swagatam e-Arrival Card (indianvisaonline.gov.in/earrival) runs on the same infrastructure as the e-visa portal. When the portal fails with 525, the arrival-card form usually fails too. The arrival card is separate from the visa and is meant to be filled within 72 hours before arrival — if the form won't load well in advance, try again closer to departure.

Bottom line

Apply for the e-visa 2–4 weeks before travel; don't leave it to the last 72 hours.
Portal down and flight within 7–10 days → switch to a paper visa immediately.
Bookmark only the official URL and never pay on third-party sites.

Sources: Travel and Tour World, VisaHQ News (2026-02-02), Times of India, DownOrNot, wicwic-monitor first-party logs.