If the bridge disconnects or stalls, work through these checks.

Common causes

  • Access token expired — re-run the auto-login.
  • Network sleep/wake — the bridge self-heals within the reconnect grace period.
  • Firewall blocking ports 5555 / 5556.

Fix

  1. Check the console for the last STATUS line.
  2. Confirm ports 5555 and 5556 are open.
  3. Restart the bridge — it will backfill missed data via RELOAD.

Work through it in this order

Nearly every disconnect report resolves at one of the first two steps. Going in order saves reinstalling something that was never the problem.

  1. Is it a new trading day? Kite access tokens are valid for a single trading day and must be regenerated each morning. A bridge that worked perfectly yesterday and shows nothing today is this, not a fault. Re-run the auto-login.
  2. Read the last STATUS line. It distinguishes an authentication failure from a network failure from a stalled feed, and those have completely different fixes.
  3. Did the machine sleep? Laptops closing the lid, or Windows sleeping the network adapter, will drop the connection. The bridge self-heals inside the reconnect grace period; beyond it, restart the bridge.
  4. Firewall or antivirus. Ports 5555 and 5556 must be open locally. Security software updating itself can silently re-block a rule that worked last week.
  5. VPN. If one is running, turn it off and retest. VPN clients frequently interfere with local loopback traffic between the bridge and MetaTrader.
  6. Restart the bridge. It backfills what was missed via RELOAD, so a restart does not leave a hole in your charts.

Symbols there, prices frozen

A different problem from a disconnect, and worth separating. If the symbol list is present but nothing ticks, check in this order: the market is actually open and that instrument is trading; the console is still reporting STATUS; and whether you are subscribed to a very large number of symbols at once. Kite enforces API rate limits, and a subscription list far beyond what you are actually watching is the usual cause of a throttled or stalled feed. Trimming the list to what you trade normally fixes it.

When it is not your setup

Zerodha’s API has its own outages and maintenance windows, and the exchanges have their own. If Kite’s web terminal is also struggling at the same moment, the bridge is reporting a real upstream problem rather than causing one. Waiting is the correct response.

Prevention

  • Disable sleep and hibernate on the machine that runs the bridge
  • Use a wired connection where you can — Wi-Fi drops are the single most common cause of mid-session reconnects
  • Start the bridge and let symbols populate before the open, rather than at 9:15
  • Add a firewall exception explicitly instead of relying on the one-time prompt
  • If uptime genuinely matters to you, run it on a Windows VPS rather than a laptop

What to send us

If it keeps happening, send these four things and we can usually identify it from the console alone:

  • A screenshot of the bridge console including the last STATUS line
  • Roughly when it dropped, and whether the market was open
  • How many symbols you have subscribed
  • Whether it recovered on its own, and how long it took
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