BENGALURU, 1 October — A shortage of one-time login codes has locked families out of a school software platform across three Indian states, after a faulty update triggered a flood of repeat text messages. KakshaNova Systems said 5,900 schools were affected, and that it had delayed digital report cards rather than switch to a shared password that could expose pupil information.
The company’s prepaid account held 8 million text messages for September. KakshaNova said its system used 6.7 million between 06:00 on 29 September and 20:00 that day, as login attempts repeatedly generated fresh codes; the normal rate is about 260,000 messages a day. By Wednesday, the supplier had suspended further delivery after the account ran dry.
The retry loop behind the outage
Parents in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Telangana were met with expired codes or no message at all. KakshaNova estimated that 1.1 million family accounts had been affected; schools using other providers continued to operate normally. In Bengaluru, staff at several schools postponed the online release of term reports and handed families sealed paper copies instead.
Vesta Mann, KakshaNova’s operations chief, said a software update intended to make logins faster had caused the system to resend codes whenever a phone network response arrived late. “The system treated a slow reply as a failed delivery, and then asked for another code. We stopped the release of reports rather than weaken the checks,” she said.
“We chose a delay over making every family’s account easier to reach.” — Vesta Mann, KakshaNova operations chief
The outage lasted 31 hours before the text supplier restored service on Wednesday afternoon. KakshaNova said it had disabled automatic retries and was delivering codes in batches, with about 73% of affected accounts working again by Thursday morning. It said no unauthorised access to pupil records had been detected.
Schools switch to paper
Yvonne Hoppe, head of a private school in Bengaluru, said the disruption arrived on the day her staff were due to send 840 term reports. They printed them and placed each in a sealed envelope for collection. “Families were worried they had missed something important. We could explain the delay, but we could not tell them when the portal would return,” she said.
Bine Mlinar, a software security specialist advising schools on the incident, said the decision to block a shared emergency login was the right one. But she said any system handling pupil records should test what happens when its message supplier fails, and set a limit on repeat requests. KakshaNova said it had added both controls to its revised software.
India’s data-protection law requires organisations to safeguard personal information, but many schools rely on outside providers to manage attendance, exam results and parent accounts. The sudden failure exposed how a single text-message account can become a gatekeeper for routine school business, even when the underlying records remain intact.
KakshaNova said it would refund affected schools for the September messaging charges and publish a technical review by 9 October. Karnataka education officials have asked schools using the service to keep paper procedures available until the company confirms that its revised login system has passed further tests.
