Error - '<' is an invalid start of a value. Path: $ | LineNumber: 0 | BytePositionInLine: 0.
Hello Zerodha Support Team,
I am writing to report a critical API issue that occurred today, Monday, June 15, 2026, between 09:15 AM and 09:18 AM IST — exactly at market opening time.
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**Issue Description:** Our application received an invalid response from the Kite Connect API that could not be parsed as JSON. The exact error encountered was:
'<' is an invalid start of a value. Path: $ | LineNumber: 0 | BytePositionInLine: 0
This indicates that instead of the expected JSON response, the API returned an HTML/XML document (likely an error page), causing our JSON deserializer to fail immediately.
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**Impact:** - Time of occurrence: 09:15 AM – 09:18 AM IST (Monday, June 15, 2026) - All API calls during this window failed - Our trading/data pipeline was disrupted during the critical market-open period
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**Details:** - API: Kite Connect REST API - Error: HTML response received instead of JSON - Duration: ~3 minutes at market open - Access token was valid and freshly generated
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**Request:** 1. Please confirm if there was any server-side issue, downtime, or maintenance on your end during 09:15–09:18 AM IST today. 2. Share server logs or incident report for this time window if possible. 3. Advise if any retry/fallback mechanism is recommended for such scenarios.
Kindly treat this as high priority as it affects live market operations.
