New Delhi, 5 Dec

A glitch in content delivery service firm Cloudflare due to the roll-out of a system update disrupted operations of several online platforms, including trading apps like Zerodha and Groww and graphic designing tool Canva.

This was the third major disruption for Cloudflare users in India within a period of six months between July and December.

Internet platform downtime tracker platform Downdetector showed several users complaining about outages of Cloudflare during the afternoon.

"Due to a cross-platform downtime on Cloudflare, Kite is currently unavailable. Please use the Kite WhatsApp backup to manage your trades while we investigate," Zerodha, which operates the Kite app, posted on X at 2.25 pm.

The trading platform updated that the problem had been resolved at 2.45 pm.

Later in the evening, Zerodha Co-founder Nithin Kamath posted on X that not just the company's trading platform was affected, but several other fintech platforms were down too.

"Cloudflare powers approximately 20-25 per cent 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. Today, they had a brief outage that affected Kite along with numerous other brokers, fintech platforms, and online services worldwide," Kamath said.

He said that the company is also working on reducing dependency on Cloudflare.

"I'm really sorry for the inconvenience today," Kamath said.

Online graphic design tool Canva also shared an update after its services were resumed.

"We're really sorry for the interruption and appreciate your patience while we got things restored," Canva said in a message to its users after an outage.

When contacted, Cloudflare said the disruption on its network was not due to any cyber attack but due to the implementation of an update.

"A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare's network at approximately 8:47 GMT and concluded approximately 9:13 GMT. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components," the company said.