Robinhood Goes Down: Shut Down...Again!

Apparently, a ā€˜ā€™ā€˜technical error’ caused the US free Trading App to go offline for two days, freezing millions of customers assets. It was Frozen. Locked Down.

Investors (mainly shorters) lost thousands of dollars not being able to get out of positions.

Conspiracy theories suggest the framework was hacked or the system glitched due to bad coding not able to handle the leap year. (wtf?!)

Of course, Robin Hood’s development team deny this but… if this can happen to an established platform of millions of users in the US, is it not worying for its pending UK rollout?

anyone worried ?

Because loads of investing platforms suddenly experiencing ā€œtechnical difficultiesā€ during extremely turbulent market conditions doesn’t sound suspicious at all :thinking:

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So 1 service goes down. But no event is singular enough for the tinfoil fraction to scream ā€˜cospiracy’ :smiley:

It is the very message my company’s CEO told us once at the staff meeting. A lot of the systems at the brokers in the past 10 years have not been build to adapt a sharp rise of volume and volatility because we live in a world of low rate, low vol and low active trading. All will change once the tide changes. He blames that to ETFs being ā€œdumpā€ in both directions of the market.

Hargreaves Lansdown has also seen issues this morning - many features are not working including buying and selling, Direct Debits have been delayed too for some reason. Limit orders and linked accounts are still broken on HL, and there were similar issues last week.

I suspect most customer-facing brokers are going to find it hard to keep up with sudden spikes in volume as almost all their customers check their portfolio and gets quotes for buying/selling - even just the huge increase in checks on portfolio value and prices could cause problems, without the increase in orders and volatile prices.

Degiro has some issues as well

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I’m seeing comments on Twitter from CNBC, etc. that Robin Hood is completely down again today. Not a good look on a volatile day like this. :frowning:

This is when we need a detailed post from @Ian on how to scale on Google Cloud. Hashtag serverless. Good to luck to every engineer out there.

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I want to praise Freetrade team on a day like this. Robinhood had some serious issues with its app yet Freetrade, a much smaller company is striding through today with no issues on its app. Quite an achievement!

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a case to sue perhaps ?

The YouTuber’s of a more mature age that I’ve seen in the states say they can’t take Robinhood as a main long term brokerage or their investments as they do not offer a Roth IRA and they plan to launch here without an ISA account. Tax protected accounts are so important for long term investors.

Well a year and a half ago i must admit - i felt the same way about upcoming disruptor, FreeTrade.

So as a hedge, that’s why i have a longstanding Hargreaves account and an account with debutant FreeTrade.

HL’s online dealing service hasn’t gone down since 1999. With that pedigree it gave me some piece of mind … but a part of me wanted a piece of that debutante’s 0% commision sweet apple pie :slight_smile:

So moral of the story - have both accounts - one for my SIPP / ISAs and one for throwing money at lots of cheap anf cheerful 0% commision trades. If I’m not able to trade in FT one day, i just buy it in my HL ISA…

Safety in Numbers.

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I will have a Freetrade ISA forever but will also use other platforms. Good for us and good for the platforms. It just sits right with me.
I will spread over 3 platforms.
All funnelled in Via ISA’s. (1 per tax year).

The previous outage was just ridiculous… The devs had the exact same issue 4 years ago because the code wasn’t programmed with leap years in mind or something to that effect… Crazy!

My portfolio is spread across

  • Interactive Brokers
  • FreeTrade
  • TradeStation only for speculating on Futures (e-micro and e-minis)
    HL and iii.co.uk (I’ve had both since 2007, slowly moving away from them lol)

There were a few tail events when other platforms went down e.g. Brexit result day, HL was offline in the morning. Stocks gapped down huge. I wanted to pick up some. IBKR saved the day for me.

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I think that conspiracy theory was debunked.

It was a traffic issue, Ian from Freetrade commented on their infrastructure.

Oh really didn’t realise it was a conspiricy… I saw it on /WSB laughed then went back to business continuity testing :joy:

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Yeah that’s where I saw it too originally.

There’s some more info in this thread:

Which I probably should have merged but :man_shrugging:

No surprise:

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