Indian stock market investors faced a chaotic trading session today as major brokerage platforms Groww and Zerodha reportedly went down, leaving millions of users unable to access their portfolios. The disruption is linked to a massive global outage at Cloudflare, a critical web infrastructure provider, which has knocked out services for apps and websites worldwide.
What is Happening?
Starting around 2:00 PM IST on Friday, December 5, 2025, traders began flooding social media platform X (formerly Twitter) with complaints. Users reported being unable to log in, view charts, or place orders.
Instead of their dashboards, users are seeing frustrating error messages such as:
"500 Internal Server Error"
"502 Bad Gateway"
"Connection Timed Out"
This isn't just an issue with your internet. These errors indicate that the servers acting as a "gateway" (Cloudflare) are failing to connect you to the apps (Zerodha/Groww).
Why are Groww and Zerodha Down?
The culprit appears to be Cloudflare, a service that powers security and speed for a vast portion of the internet. When Cloudflare goes down, every website using it—from trading apps to AI tools like Quillbot and even outage trackers like Downdetector—goes down with it.
Reports confirm that this is a global incident. It is not limited to India or stock brokers; users across the US and Europe are also facing similar blackouts on various digital services.
Note for Traders:
This is a backend infrastructure failure. Uninstalling and reinstalling your app will not fix the issue. You must wait for Cloudflare to resolve the server blockage.
A Recurring Nightmare for Traders
This outage comes just weeks after a similar incident on November 18, 2025, where a "routine configuration change" at Cloudflare triggered a bug that took down global services for hours.
For Indian traders, the timing is critical. With the market volatile due to recent FII selling and upcoming lock-in expiries for major stocks, a blackout during trading hours can result in significant financial anxiety.
What Should You Do Now?
If you are currently stuck with an open position or cannot access your funds:
Do Not Panic Sell: Panic often leads to mistakes once the app comes back online.
Check Official Status Pages: Look at the official X handles of Zerodha (@zerodhaonline) and Groww (@_groww) for real-time updates.
Try Alternative Login Methods: Sometimes, the mobile app may be down while the web browser version works, or vice versa.
Call & Trade:
If you have an urgent position to square off, try using the "Call & Trade" desk facility provided by your broker, though lines will likely be jammed.
Conclusion
As of now, Cloudflare engineers are investigating the "service degradation." Services are expected to be restored gradually. We will update this blog post as soon as the apps are live again.
