Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath apologises for technical snag on day markets hit all time high

Online broker Zerodha’s chief executive, Nithin Kamath on Tuesday apologised for two consecutive technical snags that users faced in the last one month.

Kamath’s apology comes a day after the most recent tech outage of Zerodha's website and mobile app, on December 4 and another on November 6.

“The issues on Nov 6th and Dec 4th were triggered due to edge cases with our external dependencies. This is no excuse, and I understand that, as a platform, we are responsible for all the issues you face.” he said in a blog post.

He further explained, “Yesterday’s issue seems to be because of an exponentially larger number of customer password reset requests that caused login issues.”

On Monday, December 4, Indian stock markets opened at an all-time high. The rally was triggered by the Bhartiya Janta Party's (BJP) win in three states in the assembly elections, which also serves as an indication of the upcoming general election next year.

Minutes after the market opened, users took to X, formerly known as Twitter to report the tech outage at Zerodha.

According to Kamath, this outage affected over 10% of its users. “On a normal day, we receive about 3500 to 4000 customer tickets, and about 10 lakh users trade daily. Yesterday, we had about 7700 tickets, an increase of about 4000. We believe that ~10% of active users faced disruptions intermittently for about 30 minutes,” Kamath said.

“We discovered that this was the result of an increase in the geo-location accuracy of the IP/geo-location database that we use. A routine update of this database happened over the weekend. We believe this led to a large influx of password reset requests from confused users, putting a strain on our login systems and resulting in login failures. We will share a detailed RCA on the disclosure page soon,” he further added.

Meanwhile, he also said, “The Nov 6th issue was due to an unscheduled update in the anti-malware monitoring service from our EMS vendor, which started throttling our servers.”

In a tweet sharing the blog post, Kamath said that this is not an excuse. “…as a platform, we are responsible for all the issues you face. But I wanted to share with you what went wrong and what we are doing about it,” he added.