Stock trading app Robinhood suffered its third major outage in a week, as US stocks tumbled due to concerns over coronavirus and an oil price war.
The service from the free stock-trading pioneer crashed two other times last week, and then the third crash came right after the weekend, keeping clients on the sidelines during historic trading days. The business has around 10 million users.
The stock exchange app was forced to stop trading, albeit only for around 15 minutes. The trading was stopped automatically during a major stock market drop, in order to prevent free fall. However, the rest of the issues continued and ended up lasting for over five hours, in total.
Trading is currently down on Robinhood and we’re investigating the issue. We’re focused on getting back up and running as soon as possible and we’ll update the status page with the latest https://t.co/mON07oWvHy.
— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) March 9, 2020
Robinhood’s wave of outages continues
The first two outages took place in the early days of March, and the company kept posting updates on Twitter, as well as publishing an update on their blog. However, its users were annoyed by the reoccurring incidents.
I am losing money by the second because I can not cancel my order and or sell anything. I should have learned my lesson last week and got out, but made the mistake of thinking RH learned their lesson. I am dumb, but I am closing out my account and hope everyone else does to.
— Jake Everett (@jheveret) March 9, 2020
The founders and co-chief executive officers Vlad Tenev (pictured, right) and Baiju Bhatt (pictured, left) themselves wrote in last week’s blog post that the outages are caused by stress on the platform’s infrastructure, but it is believed that yesterday’s outage has no connection to the ones from last week.
Trading has been restored and Robinhood is back up and running again. Thank you for your patience as we resolved this issue.
— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) March 9, 2020
A Robinhood client based in Sarasota, Florida, has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of himself and other traders on Wednesday evening. Travis Taaffe alleges that Robinhood was negligent and breached its contract by failing to “provide a functioning platform,” leaving traders unable to move money while stock markets surged.
The outages put new pressure on the start-up, which reached a $7.6bn valuation in its last round of fundraising. The company was among the first to offer free trading in US stocks, a move larger retail brokerages have mimicked, increasing the competition for customers.
Meanwhile, its status page shows that all systems are currently operational.
