Zerodha, a discount broking firm, has blamed the digging work for the Metro rail project being carried out across Mumbai for an outage on Wednesday.

Clients faced severe difficulties logging in to its Kite web and mobile app after 9.03 am on Wednesday, it said in a statement. The issue was resolved after two hours. The issue was primarily due to leased line connectivity between its data centres in Mumbai.

The firm suspects Metro digging work was the reason for the multiple of its primary and back-up 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, do not automatically switch to the back-up lines.

“Every day over two million trades are executed through us. Unfortunately, since the lines flapped during the market opening, over 3.5 lakh clients constantly tried to log-in into Kite multiple times causing the login system to build a massive queue of login requests over the already flapping leased lines,” Zerodha statement added. The only permanent solution for issues related to login is to remove such over-the-network dependencies between data centres. To this end, it is rebuilding the Kite login system works. 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.

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