02 May 2018, 08:48 PM

Kite downtime today (2nd May)

Traders,

Our clients had severe difficulties logging into Kite web & mobile post 9.03 AM today. It took almost two hours for the issues to be resolved. Clients who were logged in from before and those using our desktop applications were not significantly affected. But considering that most of our clients use Kite and login around 9 AM, today was one of the toughest days we have had as a business.

The issue was primarily due to leased line connectivity between our data centres in Mumbai. We suspect Metro digging work reason for multiple of our primary and backup lines to “flap” (as this had affected other services in the past several weeks). Flapping is when leased lines don’t completely fail and hence don’t automatically switch to the backup lines.

Every day over 2 million trades are executed through us. Even the largest retail brokerages in the US execute just around half of this. At the scale we are at, these infrastructure issues we face in India can have a snowball effect on the trading platform like it did today. Unfortunately, since the lines flapped during market opening, over 3.5 lakh clients constantly tried to log into Kite multiple times causing the login system to build a massive queue of login requests over the already flapping leased lines. The scale of this issue was unprecedented, as you now know.

Having multiple primary and backup modes of connectivity still did not help today. The only permanent solution for issues related to login is to completely remove such over-the-network dependencies between data centres. To this end, we’re rebuilding how the Kite login system works completely. This will also have the added benefit of doing away with the current 2FA security questions in favour of a simpler numeric PIN-based system.

This should prevent the particular network failure scenario that happened today in the future, in addition to improving your login experience.

I am aware that a “sorry” won’t help, even so, I am extremely sorry for the downtime today. We as a team are constantly working to ensure that we can offer the best trading platforms to you.

Again, we deeply regret the pain caused.

Nithin Kamath