Interactive Brokers Experiences Technical Issues

Interactive Brokers, a brokerage firm based in the United States, has been experiencing technical issues with its website this Thursday. In particular, the firm’s European systems were down for at least an hour.

According to users on Twitter, clients have not been able to log in to their accounts and access their money. On the company’s website, which details its current system status, it said that its system was experiencing a problem/outage which was causing login problems and was being investigated with the highest priority. However, the company’s website now reflects that it no longer has issues.

Its scary not being able to access your money... can't even login... and now its locked me out for 5 mins cause apparently too many login attempts... ffs

— MikeHunt69vix (@MikeHunt69vix) March 5, 2020

The brokerage’s website was confirmed down for Europe. It is not clear at this point if all of the company’s sites were down, or only Europe. A number of people have flocked to Twitter, stating that the system is down, with one tweet claiming the outage lasted for at least an hour and 20 minutes.

Speaking to Finance Magnates, a spokesperson for Interactive Brokers confirmed that its systems were down briefly in Europe earlier today, but the services have now resumed as normal.

#interactivebrokers systems DOWN for over 1 hour and 20 minutes now!! pic.twitter.com/qdnnM3Rm2z

— FiorenZo (@zorrotrading) March 5, 2020

In terms of those affected, the spokesperson said that some clients in the UK and EU were impacted by the system issues. Currently, it is not known what has caused the outage.

"Although Interactive Brokers’ Trader Workstation and IBKR mobile trading platforms were down briefly, due to a server issue, clients still had access to other trading platforms (Client Portal and WebTrader) from the ibkr.com site during this time," the spokesperson said.

Another outage for a US trading provider

Interactive Brokers is the second US-based trading provider to experience a system outage this month. Earlier in March, Robinhood, a commission-free stock trading app, also experienced technical issues.

Specifically, the stock trading app experienced a system-wide outage on Monday, which left many users unable to access their accounts. The outage left many of Robinhood’s customers furious, with a group of traders allegedly gathering signatures to sue the stock-trading app.

There were a couple of theories floating around as to what caused the crash – a Leap Day bug, high trading volumes, and others were all pointed to as the reasons. However, on Tuesday, Robinhood made an official statement on the crash, stating it was a combination of volatile market conditions, record volumes, and record account sign-ups.