Following the CloudFlare outage that disrupted the operations of several trading platforms today, Nitin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha, said the short downtime not only disrupted ‘Kite’ services but also affected countless other brokers, fintech platforms and online services worldwide. While underlining the dangers of over-reliance on a single digital backbone, Kamath apologized for the inconvenience, and the company is working to diversify its network architecture to reduce reliance on CloudFlare.

“Cloudflare powers roughly 20-25% of all Internet traffic globally. It’s the infrastructure behind millions of websites and applications – from content delivery and DDoS protection to DNS services. When a Cloudflare outage happens, it doesn’t just affect one company; it affects a significant portion of the Internet. At the same time, they were briefly affected today with KNU. Fintech platforms and online services worldwide,” the tweet said.

Billionbrains Garage Ventures (Grove) and Angel One also suffered service disruptions as a result of an outage at a US-based internet service provider due to maintenance.

Also Read: Cloudflare Down: Zerodha, Groww And Other Big Stalker Broker Websites Down As Internet Service Provider Under Maintenance

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

“This is why we have created Kite Backup on WhatsApp. This system is independent of our primary systems. Even when an external outage affects Kite, you can exit your status via WhatsApp. Today only a few thousand people have used the WhatsApp service. See the post in comments for steps on how to use it,” Kamath said in a tweet.

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

What is Kite Backup on WhatsApp?

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

It has no dependencies on Kite web and mobile systems and connects directly to various OMS installations (silos) across datacenters.

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

How to use Kite Backup?

You can use Kite Backup by following these 4 steps:

1) Save Contact Number: +91 99644 52020

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

3) Provide Authentication: Enter your Zerodha User ID and PAN when prompted

4) Complete Verification: Enter the SMS OTP you received

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