"Edge Cases": Zerodha Founder Apologises After Outrage Over Outage

A day after the website of Zerodha faced an outage, with many users reporting login issues, the CEO of the popular online stock broker issued an apology for two glitches occurring in as many months. Monday's outage came on a day when benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty had hit record highs, prompting several users to take to social media to complain.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Zerodha Founder and CEO Nithin Kamath acknowledged the issue and assured users that mechanisms have been put in place to prevent it from occurring again.

"In the business updates post I shared in August this year, I mentioned how we hadn't had any large tech issues for a couple of years. Unfortunately, we have had two episodes in quick succession in the last two months, affecting between 5 and 20% of our active customers," Mr Kamath said.

He went on to point out that the company has multiple external dependencies, including exchanges and depositories, data centres, and leased lines for connectivity between exchanges and data centres. 

"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. But I wanted to share with you what went wrong and what we are doing about it," the CEO said.

"The Nov 6th issue was due to an unscheduled update in the anti-malware monitoring service from our Execution Management System vendor, which started throttling our servers," he added.

Mr Kamath attributed Monday's issue to a much larger number of customer password reset requests, which caused login problems. 

"We now have put in place fixes to ensure these types of cases don't affect our platform in the future. While we continuously put a lot of effort into ensuring all types of scenarios are factored in proactively, it is impossible for any technology platform to cover all edge cases... Please be assured that, as a team, we are doing whatever we can to ensure the platform's stability," the statement said. 

The founder and CEO said social media has been a "double-edged sword" for the company and, while it had made interacting with customers easier, there is a "disproportionate" increase in the number of posts on X on a day like Monday. 

"I am in no way saying this to minimise the issues traders faced, but just to highlight that we have a younger and more vocal online audience. Given that the markets moved significantly, there was a lot of interest from non-transacting users logging in to check their portfolios, making the disruption seem much larger than otherwise," he said.

Ending with an apology, Mr Kamath gave an assurance that the company sees stability and reliability as its top priorities. 

"We are working hard towards that in whatever way possible. We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience to those who were affected. If there have been any losses due to the incidents, create a ticket, and our team will try to get back to you as soon as possible with the best way to resolve them. Sorry again," he signed off.