Nikhil Kamath, the founder of Zerodha, took to social media platform X to issue an apology on Tuesday for the consecutive technical issues that occurred on November 6 and December 4, causing inconvenience to users.
In his post on X, Kamath acknowledged the disruptions and expressed regret, stating, “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.”
Kamath detailed the external dependencies that Zerodha has as a broker, including exchanges and depositories, data centers (physical and cloud), leased lines for connectivity, the Execution Management System (EMS) vendor, and Cloudflare for SSL. He explained that the issues on November 6 and December 4 were triggered by edge cases with these external dependencies.
The November 6th issue was attributed to an unscheduled update in the anti-malware monitoring service from Zerodha’s EMS vendor, which led to server throttling. Kamath provided a detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for this incident.
The December 4th issue, according to Kamath, was caused by an unusually large number of customer password reset requests, leading to login issues. An increase in geo-location accuracy of the IP/geo-location database used by Zerodha triggered a surge in password reset requests, causing strain on the login systems. Kamath assured users that fixes have been implemented to prevent such scenarios in the future.
While acknowledging the challenges and expressing the team’s commitment to platform stability, Kamath addressed the impact of social media, noting its double-edged nature. He emphasized that the platform’s stability and reliability are top priorities and apologized for any inconvenience caused.
Kamath encouraged users who faced losses due to the incidents to create a ticket, and the Zerodha team will work to provide the best resolution.
In conclusion, Kamath reiterated the team’s commitment to addressing challenges and apologized again for the disruptions, stating, “Sorry again.”
