Another Robinhood Outage Angers Investors Amid Trading Surge

Just after Monday morning's opening bell, Robinhood tweeted: "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 status.robinhood.com." At about 10:30 a.m. Monday morning, Robinhood tweeted: "Trading has been partially restored on Robinhood and our team is working to get our platform fully back up and running."

The company did not provide a reason for the outage in its tweets. It did not elaborate much on its website, either, saying there: "The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented. We are experiencing issues with equities, options and crypto trading."

Robinhood updated the status of the issue Monday afternoon, saying at the website: "Trading on Robinhood has been functional for new orders with the exception of fractional equities since at least 10:25 AM ET." The platform was fully operational by 3:30 PM ET, a company spokesperson said. The company believed the interruption was not related to the outage experienced March 2 and was working internally and with its partners to understand what led to the issue, the spokesperson said, adding: "We know this interruption was frustrating for our customers — especially after last week and on a day that trading was halted market-wide. Our platform is now fully operational and we're working hard to improve our service during these historic and volatile market conditions."

One week before Robinhood's March 2 outage, investors of Charles Schwab, Fidelity and TD Ameritrade — firms that, unlike Robinhood, also cater largely to RIAs — were not able to access their retirement accounts at those firms' websites due to outages. And TD Ameritrade also faced a temporary website outage right at the start of 2020.

However, there were no reports Monday of those other companies' sites — or with those of Betterment and Vanguard — experiencing any major issues.

"Each firm has its own architecture and infrastructure, and the process can break down in a number of places," according to Joel Bruckenstein, president of Technology Tools for Today. "It could be that their site is not capable of handling the web traffic, or it could be something on the back end (not enough processing power, etc) to handle the volume," he told ThinkAdvisor on Monday, adding: "It could also have something to do with the communication between them and the exchanges. I don't think there is one answer here except historic volume that impacts each firm at whatever their weakest link is."

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