Zerodha faced a major outage across India, including other trading platforms like Groww. This was due to Cloudflare outage that essentially powers almost 25 percent of all Internet traffic globally. Zerodha co-founder and CEO Nithin Kamath has now issued a public apology for the outage and has outlined all the possible measures the company is undertaking to prevent such an event in the future.
The incident, which unfolded in the afternoon, affected Zerodha's flagship Kite platform, alongside rivals like Groww, Angel One, and Upstox, leaving millions of retail investors unable to log in, execute trades, or access market data for nearly two hours. Users reported '500 internal server errors' and login failures, sparking a surge in complaints on social media and outage-tracking sites like Downdetector.
Kamath, in a detailed post on X, explained that the root cause was a brief downtime at Cloudflare, the US-based content delivery network (CDN) that powers 20-25 percent of global internet traffic, including DDoS protection, DNS services, and app infrastructure for millions of sites worldwide.
"When Cloudflare has an outage, it doesn't just affect one company; it impacts a significant chunk of the internet simultaneously," Kamath wrote, noting the ripple effects on brokers, fintech apps, and services like Shopify, Zoom, Claude, and Canva.
Cloudflare confirmed the issue stemmed from internal logging adjustments and was not a cyberattack, with services fully restored within an hour. Zerodha swiftly activated its 'Kite Backup on WhatsApp' feature, a standalone system independent of primary infrastructure, to allow users to exit positions during the blackout. Kamath revealed that only a few thousand users availed this workaround, urging more to familiarise themselves with it via a linked guide.
"We're also actively working on reducing our dependency on Cloudflare," the CEO added, signaling long-term resilience efforts. "I'm really sorry for the inconvenience today."
Groww, another major player, echoed similar sentiments, confirming the outage's external origin and assuring users of normal trading resumption post-recovery. Angel One and Upstox also reported intermittent glitches but confirmed full operations soon after.
The event exposes the vulnerabilities in India's booming retail trading ecosystem, where reliance on global tech giants like Cloudflare exposes platforms to cascading failures. Last month, a similar Cloudflare outage, caused many forex and (contracts for difference) CFD brokers to lose money. A report suggested that CFD brokers may have lost an average of $1.58 billion in trading volumes due to the outage.
