Glitch probe on at HDFC Securities; Zerodha faces snag

A few brokerage firms faced a technical issue on Monday temporarily preventing traders on those platforms from executing any trade. This has raised concern among investors and traders as the incident took place less than a week after trading was halted on the National Stock Exchange for four hours because of a technical problem.

The brokerage firms that faced a temporary technical issue in early trade on Monday are HDFC Securities, Angel Broking, and discount brokerage firm Zerodha.

“On the morning of 1 March 2021, we suffered a technical glitch where the confirmation for orders placed in NSE cash segment were not received. All our other segments and our digital platforms were working well. The issue was resolved at 9:50 am,” HDFC Securities said. The brokerage firm said it is investigating the issue and trying to identify the root cause.

Zerodha also said that some of its users faced problems while placing orders intermittently on Kite for a few minutes. “The problem has been resolved now,” it said.

BSE and NSE issued statements that operations were going on smoothly. “All the operations on the NSE platforms are functioning smooth and normal,” an NSE spokesperson said. “There is no issue on fresh orders or square-offs at BSE,” BSE said. “The all segments working fine statement was given in response to brokers and investors reporting the problem on twitter on a competing exchange today morning. No one has reported any problems in trading at BSE India today or last week any day,” Ashish Chauhan, chief executive officer, BSE, said in a tweet.

NSE had said it had to shut down temporarily on 24 February because of a telecom link failure leading to unavailability of online risk management. Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday said the technology-driven glitch at the NSE was unintended.

“Even where complete foolproof systems are laid, you find that in the NSE a couple of days ago when there was a glitch, kind of technology driven glitch, which nobody intended or nobody could have anticipated it, but that glitch has cost us immensely and lessons are being learnt. May be that is an issue of interoperability between the two exchanges but that is the kind of thing where seamless digital payments is the goal that we have to aspire for,” Sitharaman said at the 45th Civil Accounts Day organised by the CAG.