Nithin Kamath, founder of Zerodha and chief executive, took to X to apologise for the outage of Kite during yesterday’s market hours. Kite is the online trading platform by Zerodha, which uses Cloudflare, a cloud service provider for multiple apps. Other apps, along with Kite, such as Valorant, Instagram, Crunchyroll, Shopify-based e-commerce sites, Zoom, Canva, Perplexity, Claude, Fortnite, Facebook, and LinkedIn, were also affected by the 24-minute outage. 

Kamath, in his post, apologised for the downtime while explaining the requirement to use the Kite WhatsApp Backup service in case of such incidents. “Cloudflare powers approximately 20-25% of all internet traffic globally. 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 affect one company; it impacts a significant chunk of the internet simultaneously,” he wrote. 

He explained how the Kite Backup works on WhatsApp. “This system is independent of our primary systems. When external outages impact Kite, you can still exit your positions through WhatsApp. Only a few thousand people used the WhatsApp service today. Check out the post in the comments for steps on how to use it.” 

Kamath also stated that Zerodha is actively working on reducing our dependency on Cloudflare. 

Here’s how to access the backup service:

If the Kite web and mobile both become inaccessible during market hours, the backup mode over WhatsApp will allow one to exit their open orders and positions.

Add this number to the phone’s contact book. +91-9964452020

Send a “hi” message on WhatsApp to this number to initiate the backup flow. It typically takes several seconds to receive a flow.

Provide authentication by entering the Zerodha user ID and PAN when prompted.

Complete verification by entering the SMS OTP received.

Kite’s WhatsApp-based backup system uses WhatsApp’s Flow user interface, not the conventional back-and-forth messaging flow. Here are some of the features:

It is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.

It does not use Amazon AWS services or Cloudflare.

It has no dependency on the Kite web and mobile systems. It connects to the various OMS installations (silos) across data centres directly.

It uses WhatsApp as the primary interface (Meta’s independent infrastructure).

It is a fully parallel and independent system.

What about users who do not have WhatsApp?

As per their latest blog, the Kite web and mobile have multiple layers of redundancy built within them that are available to every customer automatically. Call and trade is another backup mechanism available to everyone. The WhatsApp-based backup system is an additional offering for customers who use WhatsApp.

What are the limitations of the Kite Backup system?

The blog stated that the Kite Backup system over WhatsApp is designed to be a last resort in case all primary trading platforms become unavailable and is not designed to be a trading or investment platform. The WhatsApp Flow offers only a rudimentary interface that permits very few interactions. Therefore, one can view holdings, margins, open orders and positions. Open orders and positions can be squared off. New orders or any other advanced features are not available. The backup system offers redundancy over Kite’s trading systems and infrastructure, such as Amazon AWS and Cloudflare, which Kite depends on. However, it does not offer redundancy over the core OMS (Order Management Systems) located in physical data centres. OMS systems have different redundancy measures.