Four US digital trading apps experienced technical issues this week
Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard and Charles Schwab all reported technical difficulties at the beginning of this week. Problems arose as customer trades surged on the last day of August.
Some reports have speculated that Apple and Tesla’s stock splits, which came into effect on 31 August, had something to do with the trading apps’ problems.
The digital brokers have since resolved the issues they were having on Monday.
It’s rare for as many as four digital brokerage platforms to experience issues all at the same time
What happened?
Robinhood says some users were facing “delayed order status updates” – it promised users that order execution was not impacted by the display delay.
The $8.3 billion-valued trading platform announced shortly after noon in New York that all these issues were fixed.
Charles Schwab says that “due to a technical issue”, it’s website ‘Schwab.com’ was “intermittently inaccessible for some clients”. The website is now back up and running.
TD Ameritrade states it was experiencing “high levels of slowness” on both its web platforms and mobile app. But these systems are working normally again.
Vanguard notes that it was hit by “intermittent connectivity issues” impacting its websites, mobile apps, and phones the same day. At around 08:30 pm New York time, the firm said issues had been resolved.
It’s rare for as many as four digital brokerage platforms to experience issues all at the same time. Downdetector listed more than 2,900 complaints for Robinhood, and more than 7,000 for TD Ameritrade.
Adding to Robinhood’s March outages
In March, Robinhood suffered three separate outages after sharp drops in prices led to overwhelming volumes.
A group of customers filed three separate class-action lawsuit against the company. These class-actions make up one big class-action case based out of California.
The fintech put the outages down to an “unprecedented load” on the fintech’s infrastructure, blaming in part a “record” number of account sign-ups.
The lawsuit requests an injunction for Robinhood to install a more robust system. This is what most of the complaint leans on, namely the fintech’s supposed lack of redundancy-based architecture.
The fintech’s latest issues won’t help its case, which is still in the discovery phase. Mike Taaffe, a Florida-based attorney working on the case, told FinTech Futures in March that “hundreds” of angry customers had called into his office demanding reimbursements.
Read next: Will regulators make an example of trading unicorn Robinhood?
