Namaste Tribe! On Sunday, we hit two major milestones in our history. First, WRX hit an all-time-high, and second, WazirX recorded $350 Million USD in 24-hour volume - the highest ever trading volume by any crypto exchange in India. At around 10 PM IST, we began receiving reports from some users about having intermittent access to WazirX. The issue eventually snowballed, leading to the app and website becoming completely inaccessible.
Since Day 1, we’ve been building WazirX as India’s most trusted exchange that’s transparent with communications, and I want to share what happened yesterday:
Yesterday, we noticed a tremendous surge in the incoming traffic on our platform. We have automatic scaling systems in place which start creating new server instances to accommodate surge in traffic. To create new servers, our scaling system relies on several components one of which is provided by a third-party service provider. Due to an unprecedented traffic, we hit an internal rate limit with our service provider, and as a result, our scaling system was unable to create new instances for incoming users. Our existing servers were forced to accommodate existing as well new users, and this pressure caused all our servers to get clogged.
Unfortunately, it was not a straightforward way to increase limits with the service provider, and our team had to build a solution quickly to circumvent this issue. After working on it all night, we got the product back up at 5:30 AM IST. We would have been happier if we had got it back online quicker, but given our scale, even the smallest change takes time to come into effect. I want to assure you that all your funds are safe.
What will we do in the future to avoid this?
This downtime was a huge learning experience for us. As we continue to grow, we’re working on preparing our scaling systems. We’re also building systems in place to ensure that any issue in one part of a service does not affect the rest of our services. We’ll also focus on communicating with you via all online channels and keeping you abreast of what is happening in real-time.
On behalf of my team, I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. We’ll work harder on making WazirX more robust with each passing day.
Jai Hind!
Nischal Shetty
Founder & CEO, WazirX