Retail investors are impacted by a global Cloudflare outage that impacts the services of Zerodha and other brokers

On Tuesday, as the domestic equities market indexes inched upward, individual investors had difficulty placing buy and sell orders on cheap brokerage platforms such as Zerodha owing to a technical failure at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. After being unavailable to several customers for the most of the morning, the services were restored at 1 p.m.

"Cloudflare (network transit, proxy, and security service), utilized by the majority of the world's internet enterprises, is experiencing a global outage. If you are unable to access our websites or mobile applications, please switch to a different ISP, as a different route may work," Bangalore-based Zerodha tweeted this morning.

At 12:50 p.m., it was reported that the Cloudflare network had returned to normal and all sites are now operational.

Users of other brokers, such as Upstox and Groww, were also unable to access their demat accounts. "Our CDN partner, Cloudflare, is now experiencing troubles in India, which may temporarily render some of our services inaccessible," Upstox stated.

The Cloudflare outage affected millions of internet users throughout the globe, who saw the error message "500 internal server error" on their screens.