Today's Downtime and What Led to it?

Today's Downtime and What Led to it?

Today morning, at around 10.15 a.m. we faced a disruption on our trading systems for about 2 ½ hours. During this time, many of you were unable to login to our app or web platform. Those of you, who were logged-in already, could not get real time rates or trade confirmations. This is the first time that trading was halted for such a long period. The services were restored by 1 p.m. but by then crucial market hours were lost for many of you. Entire 5paisa team, sincerely apologises to each one of you for this unfortunate downtime. 


While I assure you that this incident will not be repeated in the future, I also think you have the right to know what went wrong behind the scenes. 


What led to this trading downtime?


We host our entire Infrastructure in Data Centres. This infrastructure involves multiple application servers, database servers, switches, firewalls, exchange connectors, etc. We have provisioned for redundancy and back-ups for all the components involved. At around 10.15 a.m. today, a very critical component of our hardware “Hanged”. As it was not “Down” but “Hung”, the switchover to the back-up system did not happen automatically. This halted trading. Though the issue was identified immediately, the resolution, required the authorised personnel to visit the data centre. As the employees at the data centre are also working from home due to the lockdown situation, we lost time in the physical travel. Therefore, it took time to bring our systems back to normal. Login to the web and mobile application was restored at around 12.30 p.m. and trading restarted at around 12.50 p.m. In a non-Covid-19 situation, this issue should not have taken more than a minute to resolve.

I know this explanation cannot undo the inconvenience caused. However, maybe knowing the reason at least rests your mind that this is one-of-a-kind instance, triggered due to the Covid-19 situation that each one of us is stuck in.


What now?

We started our commercial operations in March 2016. In these 4 years i.e. in more than 1000 trading days, this is the 1st instance where our trading system was not operational for such a long period. Over these years, we have run several timely checks to ensure that our systems live up to the promise that we make to you time and again. This incident has thrown up some more areas where we need to focus and I assure you that I am personally evaluating every detail so that this incident is not repeated ever. 


Also, as today, we did not deliver the experience that we promised to you; we feel it’s fair not to charge our customers for our services. So all the trades executed today will not attract any brokerage. The brokerage charge in the contracts will be reversed tomorrow and it will be credited to your ledger accordingly. 


I again apologise for this incident and would want to end this with a promise that we will work harder to give you an all-time seamless trading experience.