National carrier Air India opened bookings for approximately 300 flights to several countries, including the UK and USA, between June 10 and July 1 as part of the Phase-3 of the Vande Bharat Mission. This resulted in “overwhelming” demand from travelers as the official Air India website got six crore hits during the first two hours of opening of the booking, the airline stated.

The national carrier opened its bookings for the Phase-3 of the Vande Bharat Mission at 5 pm on Friday and it tweeted at 06:08 pm: “Demand for seats from India on flights planned under Vande Bharat-3 is overwhelming. Sectors/ flights are being opened in a systematic manner for booking on the website.”

However, Many travelers vented their ire on social media, stating that Air India’s website did not function properly during the first few hours of opening when most of the flights got sold out.

In response, a passenger named Vicky Ravi tweeted, “I’ve been trying to book flights for the last one hour, ur website crashed. Please kindly help me with the booking”.

Another passenger named Mandeep Kaur said the website is “very slow and the system is crashing”. Many other passengers had similar complaints about the overwhelmed booking system of the national carrier.

While some were successful in booking their tickets, many travelers expressed their frustration stating that Air India’s website did not function properly during the first few hours of opening when most of the flights got sold out.

Air India will operate around 300 flights to Europe, Australia, Canada, the USA, the UK and Africa between June 10 and July 1 during phase 3 of Vande Bharat Mission.

While scheduled domestic passenger flights resumed on May 25 after a gap of two months, scheduled international passenger flights continue to remain suspended in India.

Under the Vande Bharat Mission, Air India and its subsidiary Air India Express started operating international flights from May 7 onwards to repatriate stranded Indians from abroad. The first phase was from May 7 to May 16, following which the second phase began.

Meanwhile, With the biggest single-day spike in COVID-19 cases, India overtook Italy to become the sixth worst-hit nation by coronavirus pandemic. According to the data released by John Hopkins University, India recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world after the United States, Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom, Spain.

India has now, 226770 total confirm cases with 109,461 recovered and 6348 people have lost their lives.