Trading 212, a fintech company and FCA-regulated broker, today said that its platform experienced technical difficulties related to Execution services, following a recent Interactive Brokers’ malfunction.
Interactive Brokers has yet to confirm the exact issues that caused the outage, but Trading 212 specifically stated on its website: “Order execution was delayed today as our intermediary Interactive Brokers had downtime, which completely hampered our ability to process trades. They are currently working on improving redundancy so that this cannot happen again.”
A user told Finance Magnates that “Trading 212 have not resolved the problem and thousands of people are still having issues. T212 have remained silent and have refused to update their customers on why the platform keeps freezing still. This can be during trades meaning significant losses of money for traders. I would suggest you contact T212 to see if you can find out what is going on.”
Both Interactive Brokers and Trading 212 did not respond immediately to a Finance Magnates request for comment. There has been no response as of yet.
As markets surged on positive vaccine news, a handful of US major brokers reported trading glitches over the last two weeks. Customers of Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and Vanguard had experienced some form of issues or slowness on their brokers’ platforms.
Trading 212 Suffered DDoS Attack
The incident at Trading 212 counts as the second confirmed system outage so far this month. Earlier, Trading 212 said it came under distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS, that attempted to paralyze its system with a flood of information.
That problem was resolved within an hour, and the retail broker said that despite the third-party protection service did not work properly, the users were able to use the platform normally.
The cyberattacks had seemingly limited disruption to trading activities as the brokerage house told clients it did not impact upon their shares or account information. There was a short breakdown in connections and it just barred users from logging into their accounts.
In responding to queries on the attack, the IT department did not give an explanation for the issue, but they quickly restored services.
Trading 212 said earlier that it had more than 400,000 account openings since the start of the year and its number of funded accounts rose to 600,000 in 2020. This makes Trading 212 the second biggest broker in the UK in terms of the number of retail accounts, adding that they have surpassed 1 billion in client assets under management.
The company was the first retail UK broker to offer commission-free trading and its core product portfolio consists of stocks, ETFs, FX, and derivatives products.
