Cloudflare 'widespread' outage causes downtime in stock trading apps

Retail investors bruised as stock trading apps face 'connectivity issues'

Cloudflare, Inc. said on Tuesday it resolved a “widespread” outage earlier in the day that affected a large number of services, including FTX, Discord, Omegle, DoorDash, Crunchyroll, NordVPN, and Feedly.

The internet infrastructure firm resolved the issue roughly an hour after users began facing issues accessing some popular sites, including Zerodha, Medium.com, news outlet Register, Groww, Buffer, iSpirt, Upstox, and Social Blade.

As domestic equity market indices were inching higher on Tuesday, retail investors had a particularly tough time placing buy-and-sell orders on discount broking platforms due to an hour-long technical outage at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare’s end.

“We are getting reports of intermittent connectivity issues on Kite (Zerodha’s flagship trading platform) via the Cloudflare network for users on certain internet service providers (ISPs). We are taking this up with Cloudflare. In the meanwhile, please try using an alternative internet connection,” tweeted Zerodha - the country’s largest broker.

“Cloudflare (network transit, proxy, security provider), used by most of the internet businesses around the world, is having a global outage. If you are unable to use our websites or applications, try switching to a different ISP as a different route may work,” it further said.

Brokerage platform Upstox also tweeted: “Our content delivery network partner Cloudflare is currently experiencing issues in India, due to which some of our services may be temporarily inaccessible.”

Cloudflare acknowledged the glitch, saying, “The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve them as quickly as possible.”

“Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network,” it said.

The incident highlighted how high dependence on third-party internet infrastructure firms can lead to disruption in key activities such as stock trading.

The company, which faced a similar outage in some parts of the world last week, didn’t disclose what caused the issue.

Earlier on Tuesday, John Graham-Cumming, the firm’s chief technology officer, said on a Hacker News thread that the outage didn’t spread worldwide, but affected “a lot of places”.

Inputs from agencies