Zerodha's Nithin Kamath Issues Apology For Consecutive Technical Issues

Zerodha's Nithin Kamath has issued an apology for the two consecutive technical issues in the last two months.

The two issues, which occurred on Nov. 6 and Dec. 4, were triggered due to "edge cases with external dependencies", and the same had affected between 5% and 20% of Zerodha's active customers, respectively, Kamath said.

"This is no excuse, and I understand that, as a platform, we are responsible for all the issues you face... We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience to those who were affected," he said.

The issue on Nov. 6 was due to an unscheduled update in the anti-malware monitoring service from the EMS vendor, the CEO said.

The issue that troubled the users on Dec. 4 occurred because of an exponentially larger number of customer password reset requests that caused login issues, Kamath said.

"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."

"While we continuously put a lot of effort into ensuring all types of scenarios are factored in proactively, no technology platform can cover all edge cases," Kamath said.

On a normal day, Zerodha receives about 3,500 to 4,000 customer tickets, and about 10 lakh users trade daily, he said. "Yesterday, we had about 7,700 tickets, an increase of about 4,000."

Kamath said that about 10% of active users faced disruptions intermittently for about 30 minutes.

Given that the markets moved significantly, there was a lot of interest from non-transacting users logging in to check their portfolio, making the disruption seem much larger than otherwise, he said.

"I want to assure you that the stability and reliability of the platform are our top priorities. We are working hard towards that in whatever way possible."