Trading Outages at Schwab, E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Other Platforms Irk Investors

"Customers are able to access our online systems," a Fidelity spokeswoman told ThinkAdvisor. "Some may have experienced slower processing speeds for a short period at market open due to extremely high volumes, but trades were processed," she said.

"Like all financial firms this morning, we have been experiencing higher than normal trading volume," according to Merrill Lynch parent Bank of America. "We currently are not experiencing any issues," the firm said.

A Robinhood spokesperson told ThinkAdvisor by email: "This morning, despite historic traffic, Robinhood systems remained operational. Our engineering teams have worked diligently to harden our infrastructure, improve reliability, and increase capacity. We're continuing to invest more than ever in making sure that our systems scale and support our customers on busy trading days."

Similarly, a TD Ameritrade spokeswoman told ThinkAdvisor: "Earlier today, due to unprecedented volumes of activity, we encountered login issues across multiple TD Ameritrade platforms that impacted some clients' ability to log in. The issue has been resolved and clients are able to access all TD Ameritrade platforms as usual. We apologize for the inconvenience and take the performance and reliability of our trading platforms very seriously."

"We understand that some Vanguard clients may have experienced difficulty accessing their accounts on our systems," Vanguard spokeswoman Dana Grosser told ThinkAdvisor at 11:30 a.m. ET. "The issue has been resolved and we encourage clients to clear their internet cache and cookies, and recycle their web browser, before logging back on," she said, adding: "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank clients for their patience."

E-Trade didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Aug. 31, a multi-system market outage affected many of the largest brokerage firm platforms, with clients taking to Twitter to voice their frustration. Only a few days earlier, TD's Thinkorswim platform experienced technical issues for several days. That followed multiple outages on the websites of TD Ameritrade and other financial firms earlier this year that led several investors to take to Twitter to complain about trades they were unable to make and money they lost as a result.