Zerodha users face service disruption for third time in 3 months
Zerodha, a prominent trading platform, experienced a service disruption on Monday, leaving users frustrated as they encountered difficulties accessing their account information, including holdings and trades. Some users reported issues with order placement and the inability to close positions, prompting concerns about the platform’s stability. This is the third month in a row that users have reported issues with the platform. Earlier complaints had come in November and December 2023.
On social media, users expressed their frustration with the recurring glitches. One user stated, “Zerodha glitches have now become the new normal; the company doesn’t bother to work on their infrastructure to fix this recurring issue. Retailers are losing money because of this broker glitch.”
Reports on DownDetector also indicated problems with Zerodha’s website, particularly in the mobile brokerage and trading services, which were flagged at 9:00 am. Responding to users’ concerns, Zerodha acknowledged the outage, attributing it to a connectivity problem. The company assured users that the issue had been resolved, stating, “Due to a connectivity issue, some of our users were intermittently facing issues with order placement on Kite. This issue is now resolved. We regret the inconvenience caused.”
Zerodha had faced technical glitches back in November 2023, where some users were not able to see their executed orders. The issue began on a Monday morning and was resolved by noon. Another technical glitch occurred in the following month.
In a blog post on December 5, Zerodha wrote, “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 per cent of our active customers.”
“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 post added.
Zerodha chief Nithin Kamath later announced that the broking platform was putting in new fixes to ensure no future glitches occurred. While the earlier two glitches stemmed from the same issue, the most recent one has been attributed to “connectivity” problems. Despite this users are upset with the “ongoing” glitches on the trading platform.
This service disruption follows a similar incident with competitor Groww app users, who reported technical issues last week. Groww faced complaints about login difficulties and issues with viewing balances and executing orders. The Groww team responded directly to users, addressing the problems until they were resolved.
As of the end of 2023, Groww held 7.6 million active traders, while Zerodha had 6.7 million. In terms of active investors, Groww overtook Zerodha as of September 2023, with 6.63 million active investors compared to Zerodha 6.48 million, according to NSE data.
First Published: Jan 29 2024 | 11:53 AM IST