Zerodha Founder Apologizes After Outrage Over Outage
New Delhi: Zerodha, the popular online stock broker, faced an outage on its website, leading to login issues for many users. In response, the CEO of the company, Nithin Kamath, issued an apology for the two glitches that have occurred in the past two months. This outage happened on a day when benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty reached record highs, causing several users to express their frustration on social media.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Nithin Kamath acknowledged the issue and assured users that measures have been taken to prevent such incidents from happening again. He admitted that despite mentioning in a previous business update that the company hadn’t faced any major tech issues in the past couple of years, they have experienced two episodes in quick succession, affecting between 5% and 20% of their active customers.
Kamath explained that the company relies on various external dependencies, including exchanges, depositories, data centers, and leased lines for connectivity. He mentioned that the issues on November 6th and December 4th were triggered by edge cases with their external dependencies. He took responsibility for the problems faced by users and emphasized the importance of addressing them.
The CEO attributed the November 6th issue to an unscheduled update in the anti-malware monitoring service from their Execution Management System vendor, which caused server throttling. As for Monday’s issue, Kamath stated that it was caused by a high number of customer password reset requests, leading to login problems.
Kamath also acknowledged the impact of social media on the company, describing it as a “double-edged sword.” While it has made communication with customers easier, there has been a disproportionate increase in the number of posts on a day like Monday. He explained that the disruption seemed larger due to the younger and more vocal online audience, as well as the significant movement in the markets.
Concluding his statement, Kamath apologized for the inconvenience caused and assured users that stability and reliability are their top priorities. He encouraged users who suffered losses due to the incidents to create a ticket, and the team will work on resolving them as soon as possible.
