Kamal Ghorui
Applying for an India e-visa, or as a matter of fact, applying for an e-visa of any country, is supposed to be a straightforward online process. In reality, for many travellers in early 2026, it has been anything but. What should take minutes has stretched into hours, sometimes days. Reason being repeated crashes, pages stuck in browsing mode, and failed submissions, turning the visa application itself into the first test of patience.Here, in the context of Indian e-via, several travellers attempting to apply for it in January have reported facing persistent technical glitches on the official portal, often getting stuck midway through the application. Pages would load intermittently, only to crash when users clicked ‘Next,’ forcing them to refresh repeatedly and re-enter details from scratch. For families applying together, the frustration multiplied, with applications stalling just as personal or passport information was being submitted.The issue came into sharp focus after one exasperated traveller (aggravating-Stage 261) took to Reddit, asking if the experience was universal or uniquely cursed. “Is it just me? Or the Indian visa online keeps crashing every time?” the post read. “I think I have pressed refresh more than 300x… The times I get through will be around less than 10x and I’m now on my family’s details but when I click next, it crashes again.I am so tired already!!!!! Any tips.” What happened next was a deluge of messages that indicated this was anything but an isolated occurrence. Several people posted very similar experiences of spending days fighting the website on different devices and browsers. “Jan 2026: Absolute terrible experience applying for e-visa. It almost took us three days to lodge two applications,” one commenter wrote.
“Tried different timings, different browsers, IE mode in Internet Explorer, several different devices.” While the complaints were consistent, so were the workarounds, albeit unconventional ones. One of the most widely endorsed solutions was abandoning mainstream browsers altogether.“The only thing that worked for us was the DuckDuckGo browser (freshly installed). First application went smoothly with no crashing,” a user noted, adding that the second application still took an entire night to complete. Some recommended using Microsoft Edge and turning on Internet Explorer mode, which, although seemingly strange in 2026, helped some users. A user also described issues with file size restrictions following the conversion of images to PDF, eventually turning to online compression services simply to get past the point of uploading. Although the process of applying was chaotic for many, once their forms were submitted, approvals were received relatively quickly. “But the processing is pretty quick. Received approval in a day,” one comment noted. Disclaimer: The above article is based on a Reddit post and Times of India has not verified the veracity of the claim
