Robinhood Markets had briefly joined a handful of US major brokers who reported on Monday trading glitches that affected thousands of customers.
A Reuters report said today that the commission-free trading app “was experiencing issues with Equities , options and crypto trading and was working to resolve the issue.” However, Robinhood apparently resolved disruptions on its platform as the status page shows “All Systems Operational.”
But according to Downdetector app, which offers real-time status and uptime monitoring for over 3,000 services, many of Robinhood users are still experiencing connection problems that involved the server connection.
Yesterday, users reported that trading platforms at major US brokerage firms were down during early morning trading that saw the three main indexes hovering near record highs. Trading issues came as stocks and oil prices skyrocketed Monday, while Gold plunged, after Pfizer revealed a vaccine breakthrough following successful trials.
However, Robinhood did not report any issues though it was part of a similar multi-system market outage that affected the US major platforms in August due to higher-than-usual trading volumes. Instead, the discount brokerage bragged that its systems remained operational this morning, despite historic traffic.
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“We’ve worked to harden our infrastructure, improve reliability, and increase capacity. We’ll continue to invest in scaling our systems to support our customers every day — including busy days like today,” Robinhood added.
In the meantime, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and Vanguard reported difficulties, including slowness with websites and mobile apps, that resulted in user complaints.
Robinhood Investigated by US regulators
A fair number of Robinhood users were frustrated with trying to figure out how they had fared many times throughout this year. At the time, clients complained about not having access to their accounts and enduring long waiting times for customer service.
Robinhood’s CEO blamed the shutdown on volatile market conditions, record trading volume, and record new account requests, which caused stress on the company’s infrastructure.
Robinhood, which was just valued at $11.7 billion, is already the subject of an investigation by the SEC and FINRA regulators into its handling of outages on its platforms.
The probes could also be extended to brokerage accounts that were compromised by an attack that gave hackers the ability to take over users’ trades and funds last month.