Robinhood has not had a good start to March, with the stock trading app experiencing a system-wide outage on Monday, which left many users unable to access their accounts.
The outage has left many of Robinhood’s customers furious, with a group of traders allegedly gathering signatures to sue the stock-buying app. Overall, users of the app have been left with one question - why?
There were a couple of theories floating around as to what caused the crash - a Leatdrp 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.
“Our team has spent the last two days evaluating and addressing this issue,” Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Robinhood, said in a blog post. “We worked as quickly as possible to restore service, but it took us a while. Too long. We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure—which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system."
“Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups.”
What is Robinhood doing next?
So what is Robinhood doing now? According to a spokesperson of the company speaking to Finance Magnates, the company is now reaching out to customers with information on how to contact them so the California-based company can work with them on a case by case basis. This may include billing credits and/or other potential compensation.
“Our team is continuing to work to improve the resilience of our infrastructure to meet the heightened load we have been experiencing,” the co-CEOs continued in the blog post. “We’re simultaneously working to reduce the interdependencies in our overall infrastructure. We’re also investing in additional redundancies in our infrastructure.
“After a brief outage this morning, our Trading Platform was stable for the remainder of the day. As our engineering team works to upgrade our infrastructure, we may experience additional brief outages, but we’re now better positioned to more quickly resolve them.”
