We’re happy to announce the beta launch of our Disaster Recovery (DR) platform for major outages, whether on Kite, Cloudflare, or our internal systems. This lightweight backup runs on a completely separate infrastructure and is accessible via WhatsApp, ensuring you can still view and exit positions when the main platform is down. Built to work independently of our core systems, it stays functional even in the event of a widespread failure.
While it offers only essential features, the goal is to give you a reliable, last-resort option to safeguard your positions during unexpected disruptions. As this is a beta release, we encourage you to try it out and share your feedback so we can improve the experience.
Why WhatsApp?
We chose WhatsApp as the alternative front end to Kite for a few key reasons. It works reliably even on low bandwidth and requires no new app installation. It scales effortlessly to handle sudden traffic spikes, which is crucial during disaster situations. As a widely used and familiar platform, most users can operate it without any learning curve. And with end-to-end encryption, your data and actions remain private and secure.
Key functions:
Log in & square off open positions (market orders only)
Cancel open orders
View positions, orders, holdings, and funds
How to use:
Send “Hi” to 9964452020 on WhatsApp from your registered number
Click Continue
Enter Client ID, PAN, and OTP
Note: This will work only from the WhatsApp account linked to the registered mobile number in the trading account. The session will be valid only for the day.
Important point to understand here is this mode is alternate to current one and most useful in case when our infra is down which will be a rare scenario.
No other broker has ever done this, atleast in India.
We chose WhatsApp as an alternative front end to Kite for several reasons. It scales well and can handle sudden spikes in traffic, which often happen during disaster situations. It is also a popular and widely used platform, so it is familiar to most people. On top of that, WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption, which keeps all communications secure.
We also wanted this setup to be completely separate from our current web-based infrastructure. By keeping it isolated from Kite’s AWS environment, we ensure that both platforms cannot fail at the same time. This makes WhatsApp a strong and reliable option for disaster recovery needs.
A great and much appreciated step from Zerodha and I can understand the the choice of Whatsapp as a medium / platform for such a solution.
However do spare a thought for those clients who use a separate number for Whatsapp and their financial transactions (for whatever reasons) or for those users who don’t use Whatsapp. What will they do when Kite fails? Shouldn’t a disaster recovery solution be available to all your clients?
My bad, I mean if one is having 3 family accounts connected to same number then OTP flow will be applied, in this case user need to message from registered number only.
Can I request you to please look into the use case where the Kite registered number is not being used on whatsapp. The number of such clients would not be negligible. Zerodha team would definitely have this data as to what %age of Kite registered numbers are active on Whatsapp. Thank you.
@Arockiya_Raja@siva
If the WhatsApp number and the number linked to the trading account are different, please provide the user with an option to enter the number linked to the trading account, or alternatively, ask for their client ID and follow the usual verification steps. This will be very helpful
