Popular online brokerage platform Robinhood suffered an outage lasting an entire trading day which prevented customers from making trades as stocks surged Monday. The outage has continued into Tuesday’s trading hours with Robinhood not providing timing for its service to be reinstated.
Yahoo Finance reports that online brokerage platform Robinhood suffered a major outage that lasted the entire U.S. trading day yesterday preventing customers from making trades as stocks surged. The system-wide issue began as markets opened with clients unable to access their accounts, two hours later Robinhood stated that the problem had been identified and its staff was working on the issue. By 4:00 p.m. New York time access had not been restored, and the outage has continued into Tuesday’s regular trading hours.
Clients of the platform blasted its handling of the situation with many saying they would be closing their accounts. One user wrote: “One of the most anticipated trading days and your service is down at market open.” Another user wrote: “What is going on — I can’t do any trades — you will lose me as a customer going forward. This is ridiculous.”
The platform crash is a major hit to Robinhood, a Silicon Valley startup that has attempted to lure in young, tech-savvy investors who want to trade entirely online. The firm was founded in 2013 and made a name for itself by offering commission-free trading via a mobile app, it has since garnered millions of customers and is valued at $7.6 billion.
Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston, commented that financial tech firms may have difficulty dealing with higher trading volumes in more volatile markets. He added: “Particularly, is the technology scalable enough to handle the amount of orders they’re getting?”
U.S. stocks surged the most they have in 14 months on Monday as investors gained confidence that central banks would intervene to mitigate any economic impacts of the coronavirus. The S&P 500 Index suffered the worst week for the benchmark since 2008 last week.
Robinhood is currently still down as of the time of the writing of this article, the status of the website can be monitored here.
Our systems are currently experiencing downtime. We’re determined to restore full functionality as soon as possible. We’ll be sharing updates here and on https://t.co/ZS733Gooqj.
— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) March 3, 2020
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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