Fidelity, Schwab, Scottrade Wrestle With Facebook Fallout

"[R]etail investors have spent much of this week looking for someone to address their losses, or even just to answer questions about where they can take their complaints," The paper notes. "The stockbrokers have generally said the problems were caused by Nasdaq, where technical issues delayed the start of trading by 30 minutes and mishandled large numbers of orders to execute or cancel shares."

It goes on to claim that brokers like Scottrade have "almost universally declined to take direct responsibility for the losses their customers suffered. The frustration of these customers has played into a broader sense that small investors got the short end of the stick in the bungled Facebook offering."

Whitney Ellis, a Scottrade spokesman, said the "issues were industrywide and beyond our control."

"Clients who have shares of Facebook stock in their accounts can trade their shares at any time," Ellis told The Times. "We have tried to address every client's concerns on an individual basis and will continue to do so until everything has been resolved."

Javier Paz, a brokerage analyst at the Aite Group told the paper that the liability for the losses suffered during the bungled IPO were in a murky legal territory and would probably "be decided in the courts."