What happened
For roughly two weeks, India e-visa approvals ran meaningfully longer than the published expectation. They are back in the normal range now, which for most applicants means a few business days from a clean application.
We do not know what caused it. Nothing was announced before it started and nothing was announced after it stopped, so what we have is what we watched: the approval timestamps stretching out, then coming back in. Anyone telling you the reason is guessing.
For a seller, back to normal means what it says. There is no backlog left on our side to drain and nothing held over from the slow stretch, so applications filed this week are clearing on the ordinary schedule.
What we told partners while it lasted
None of this was specific to India. It is the sequence we run for any destination that slows down, and it is worth writing out, because the next one will arrive just as quietly.
It reached us first as data. Approval timestamps are the earliest thing to move when a government portal gets slower, we watch them across everything we file, and a drift of that size shows up there well before it shows up in complaints.
The split in what partners had to do was clean. Anyone who had hard-coded a processing time into their booking flow showed travelers a wrong number for two weeks, and only found out if a traveler complained. Anyone reading it from the response did nothing, because there was nothing to do.
What we did not do was send a general alert. A slow fortnight on one destination is noise to a seller with no India volume, and the partners who did have volume were already quoting the raised figure without hearing from us.
GET /v1/requirements returns the current processing expectation for the passport and route, next to the consular fee at cost. When we move it, your next request carries the new figure. The same values are visible without an integration in the requirements checker, and the response shape is documented for developers.
The standing advice
Read processing time from the response at the moment you render the page. Do not cache it into copy, and do not let it settle into a help centre article that someone updates by hand twice a year. Every place you write the number down yourself is a place that will sit wrong for however long nobody is watching.
The same goes for the consular fee and the document list. Governments move them without notice, and the moves that hurt are the small ones: two extra days on an approval, a photo spec that quietly tightened. Neither makes the news. Both reach your support queue.
Slowdowns rarely announce themselves, and they never apologise afterwards. The approval data is the only warning you get, so the honest thing to show a traveler is whatever that data says today.