A group of Robinhood customers is allegedly gathering signatures to sue the stock-buying app. A Twitter handle called ‘Robinhood Class Action,’ says its operatives are actively building a case against Robinhood for their negligence and late open on March 2, 2020.
The campaign allegedly gathered more than 1476 supporters, but a visit to Change.org website, which hosts the sponsored ‘Ban Robinhood Financial LLC from FINRA’ petition, shows that none of the signatories had their identity verified.
The crusade against Robinhood comes a few hours after the company said its trading services have been restored and apologized to clients on Tuesday after technical issues marred the commission-free investing app, unnerving investors trying to access their accounts during the market rally.
Nice seeing the gains from this morning that I missed.
— jmgraham6 (@Jmgraham218) March 3, 2020
The brokerage made this announcement to its customers at approximately 16:40 GMT: “Robinhood is now fully restored. We know this has been frustrating and we will work diligently to provide the level of service you deserve.”
Earlier today, Robinhood said the technical problems with the systems were partially resolved, and the service was restored to customers on a staggered basis, which is a normal procedure following an outage, a tweet from the firm’s Twitter account said around 4:35 pm.
Robinhood has customers with more than 10 million accounts, and a fair number of them were frustrated trying to figure out how they fared during Monday’s bullish trading. Clients have complained about not having access to their accounts and having long wait times for customer service.
Robinhood clients took to Twitter to air their concerns about the technical issues as the company had been struggling to get back to normal service after a two-day outage is angering customers.
“Yea but what exactly happened??? Can you give us a clear reason, because I would say 80% of your user base is ready to leave,” said one Twitter user. Other angry users threatened to defect to Robinhood’s rivals.
I’m moving in with Charles Schwab, he’s an elderly, established gentleman who knows how to treat a portfolio. #robinhood
— Cayden (@caydenmb) March 3, 2020
The six-year-old Startup , which recently raised $900 million at an eye-popping $7.6 billion valuation, has been growing at an explosive rate, and the number of brokerage accounts on its platform is double than it was a year ago.
The impressive metrics mean that the New York startup has been able to bring on nearly as many customers as TD Ameritrade, which onboards 11 million users and has been in the online brokerage industry since 1975. One of Robinhood’s biggest competitors, E-Trade, had 4.9 million brokerage accounts at the end of 2019, with an annualized new account growth rate of seven percent.
