India's Biggest Online Trading App, Zerodha, Faces Outages, Leaving Thousands Of Investors In Peril
India”s biggest online trading app, Zerodha, with a base of more than six million investors, has faced multiple outages that too while the Indian stock market is trading at record highs, leaving thousands of its investors in jeopardy. CEO of Zerodha, Nithin Kamath, confirmed the technical glitches, saying this is the first time in a couple of years that the platform has faced large issues. He apologized for the inconveniences caused by the technical snags.
Kamath said in a letter, “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.”
On December 4, a day after the assembly election results, investors faced impediments while logging in, and they took the problems to social media with harsh criticism. On that day, the benchmark indices nifty and Sensex hit record highs on the back of the euphoria of the Narendra Modi-led BJP winning the election. Therefore, many of the investors couldn”t reap the benefits of that historic rally.
The second outage was reported on December 6. Kammath attributed the outages to “edge cases” with the external dependencies of the platform.
Kamath said, “The issues on November 6th and December 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.”
He also requested investors who incurred losses due to technical snags to raise tickets, and their issue will be resolved in due course.
“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 said.
