Zerodha’s CEO apologized for a Cloudflare outage that hit its trading platform and others globally. The 12-minute disruption highlighted reliance on single providers. Zerodha is now diversifying infrastructure, while its WhatsApp backup offered a limited lifeline. This incident renews concerns about the internet’s fragile backbone.

Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath issued a public apology following a brief Cloudflare outage on December 5 that disrupted the company’s Kite trading platform and disrupted brokers and fintech services worldwide. Acknowledging the frustration caused to traders during market hours, Kamath promised the company is actively working to reduce its dependency on Cloudflare’s infrastructure to prevent future disruptions.“Cloudflare powers approximately 20-25% of all internet traffic globally. When Cloudflare has an outage, it doesn’t just affect one company; it impacts a significant chunk of the internet simultaneously,” Kamath explained in a post on X. The 12-minute outage affected not just Zerodha, but also Groww, Angel One, Upstox, Claude AI, Perplexity, and MakeMyTrip, among others. Users reported login failures, order placement difficulties, and inability to access market data.

WhatsApp backup serves as lifeline for Zerodha during Cloudflare outage

Kamath drew attention to Zerodha’s contingency plan—Kite Backup on WhatsApp—which operates independently of primary systems. During the outage, users could exit positions through WhatsApp when the main platform was inaccessible. However, only a few thousand people used the alternative service, suggesting most traders remain unaware of this safety net. The CEO urged users to familiarize themselves with the WhatsApp backup system for future emergencies.This marks Cloudflare’s second major disruption in recent weeks. In November 2025, a similar outage took down X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and League of Legends after a database permissions error triggered Bot Management system failures. That incident lasted over three hours, making it Cloudflare’s worst outage since 2019.

Zerodha CEO commits to infrastructure diversification

Cloudflare’s massive internet footprint—providing content delivery, DDoS protection, and DNS services to millions of websites—means any technical glitch creates cascading failures across unrelated platforms within minutes. Recognizing this single point of failure, Kamath’s commitment to reducing Cloudflare dependency signals a strategic shift toward infrastructure diversification.Cloudflare confirmed on its status page that services returned to normal at 09:12 UTC (2:42 PM IST) after deploying a fix. The company continues monitoring systems for residual issues. Trading platforms have since stabilized, though the incident has renewed conversations about the internet’s fragile infrastructure and over-reliance on few providers.