Cloudflare outage: Nithin Kamath apologizes for Kite disruption and recommends WhatsApp backup to end transactions

Following the Cloudflare outage, which disrupted the operations of several trading platforms today, Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath said the brief downtime not only disrupted ‘Kite’ services but also affected many other brokers, fintech platforms and online services globally. While Kamath underlined the risks of over-reliance on a single digital backbone, he apologized for the inconvenience. The company is working to diversify its network architecture to reduce its dependence on Cloudflare.“Cloudflare powers approximately 20-25% of all internet traffic worldwide. It’s the infrastructure behind millions of websites and apps – from content delivery and DDoS protection to DNS services. When Cloudflare has an outage, it doesn’t just impact one company; it impacts a significant portion of the internet at the same time. Today they had a brief outage that affected Kite, along with countless other brokers, fintech platforms and online services worldwide,” the tweet said.

Billionbrains Garage Ventures (Groww) and Angel One were also hit with service disruptions due to the outage at the US-based internet provider, reportedly due to maintenance.Also read: Cloudflare down: Zerodha, Groww and other major stocker broker websites are offline as the ISP is under maintenance

He further said that Zerodha has activated its Kite Backup system on WhatsApp to ensure trading continuity during external disruptions. This is a completely independent setup that allows traders to exit positions even if the main platform faces downtime, he added.

“This is why we built Kite Backup on WhatsApp. This system is independent of our primary systems. When external disruptions impact Kite, you can still exit your positions via WhatsApp. Only a few thousand people have used the WhatsApp service today. Check out the post in the comments for steps on how to use it,” Kamath’s tweet read.

“I am truly sorry for the inconvenience today,” Kamath said, acknowledging the frustration caused by the outage.

What is Kite Backup via WhatsApp?

Kite’s WhatsApp-based backup system uses WhatsApp’s Flow user interface, rather than the conventional back-and-forth message flow. It is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure and does not use Amazon AWS services or Cloudflare.

It is not dependent on Kite web and mobile systems and connects directly to the various OMS installations (silos) in data centers.

It uses WhatsApp as the primary interface (Meta’s independent infrastructure) and is a completely parallel and independent system.

How do I use a kite backup?

You can use Kite Backup by following these 4 steps:

1) Save the contact number: +91 99644 52020

2) Send a WhatsApp message: Open WhatsApp and send “Hello” to this number

3) Provide authentication: Enter your Zerodha user ID and PAN when prompted

4) Complete the verification: Enter the SMS OTP you received

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