The rush to ITR Filing is picking up, and so is traffic on the income tax portal. As millions of taxpayers log in before the July 31 deadline, the government says it has upgraded e-Filing portal to make it faster and more reliable, with the changes disclosed in Parliament by the Finance Ministry.

Key Highlights

• ITR filings nearly doubled in July 2026, with July 14 seeing 12,21,854 returns filed versus 4,09,437 last year.
• CBDT upgraded the e-filing portal to handle 1 crore returns per day, addaing infrastructure and 24×7 monitoring.

The data shows that portal usage has been steadily increasing over the past week (8-14 July 2026). The largest increase was in ITR filing, with as many as 8,38,724 ITRs being filed on 8 July 2026 which is nearly double the 4,26,961 ITRs filed on 8 July 2025. It was a continuation of the trend as filings reached 10 lakh on 10 July (10,41,223) and 11 July (10,87,871). The peak number of ITRs filed on the day was on 14 July 2026 with 12,21,854 ITRs being filed, against 4,09,437 on the same day last year.

Total daily activity on the portal reached 1,61,03,603 on 14 July 2026, compared with 95,33,552 on the corresponding day in 2025. In comparison, on average in the week, total portal activity increased sharply to remain above 1.2 crore, compared to being below 1 crore for the same period last year, showing that taxpayers' engagement with the e-filing system has increased significantly during 2026.

Member of Parliament Shri Shyamkumar Daulat Barve spoke about frequent technical portal glitches, data processing error and the issue of inability to log in which he said, had affected filing during the peak compliance season. He also asked if the government knew of these continuing problems and what was being done about them.

Responding in the Lok Sabha on July 20, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said, "The CBDT has implemented a series of technical and structural remediation measures to strengthen the portal's infrastructure and performance during peak filing season." The Finance Ministry acknowledged that given the high scale of concurrent access in the peak filing period, some taxpayers may, at times, experience transient technical issues such as slower page response or intermittent delays but maintained that the portal "has been functioning in a largely stable and efficient manner supported by a dedicated Daily/Hourly Monitoring Dashboard tracking logins, ITR filings, AIS/Compliance Portal redirections, payment gateway status, error codes, and other operational indicators.

Also Read: ITR Filing Calendar Revised for AY 2026-27: Check Details

Key Steps Taken by CBDT

• Higher filing capacity: The portal has been performance-tested to process up to 1 crore returns in a single day, aimed at reducing breakdowns during the July filing rush.
• More infrastructure and bandwidth: Additional computing power, storage, memory, network capacity, and internet bandwidth have been added to help the site handle peak-hour traffic.
• 24×7 monitoring framework: A dedicated round-the-clock monitoring setup, including a central War Room, tracks portal performance in real time for faster issue resolution.
• Stronger cyber protection: Firewalls have been upgraded and protection against cyber and bot attacks stepped up. "This is important because filing season usually attracts heavy automated traffic and attempted abuse of the system. Better cybersecurity should improve stability and reduce the risk of malicious disruptions," said CA Chandni Anandan, Tax Expert, ClearTax.
• Coordination with ecosystem partners: The department has coordinated with agencies including UIDAI, RBI, banks, CDSL, NSDL, ICAI, and e-Return Intermediaries to keep PAN, Aadhaar, bank, depository, and filing-linked services working smoothly together.

Penalties Imposed on Managed Service Provider

The MP also sought details on whether contractual accountability measures or financial penalties had been initiated against the Managed Service Provider (MSP), Infosys, for prolonged portal issues. The Minister confirmed several penalties had indeed been imposed:

• Liquidated damages were imposed on the MSP for failing to deploy the IEC 2.0 project - of which the e-Filing portal is a key component - within the original July 2020 timeline.
• Based on quarterly Service Level Scores (SLS) assessing performance parameters including downtime and operational deficiencies, the government has imposed penalties for 12 quarters due to the MSP's failure to meet prescribed benchmarks.
• Contractual penalties were imposed on the MSP for application outages during the peak filing period in FY 2025–26.
• A further penalty was imposed during FY 2025–26 for delays that resulted in the extension of statutory ITR filing deadlines attributable to the MSP.