Outages at Interactive Brokers, Robinhood Annoy Investors

News December 07, 2020 at 01:38 PM
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Interactive Brokers and Robinhood experienced outages early Monday morning that prevented at least some clients from logging into or trading on their online platforms.

The outage at Interactive Brokers came just three days after the brokerage firm said it had struck a deal with Goldman Sachs to acquire the self-directed retail brokerage segment of Folio Financial. That business has about 70,000 retail investor clients and $3 billion in assets.

Monday's outages lasted long enough for several people claiming to be Interactive Brokers and Robinhood clients to complain on Downdetector's website.

Similar complaints could be found on Twitter, where several insults were directed at the company's decision to tweet about a webinar at 8 a.m. ET instead of providing an update on the outage.

Tweets about the Robinhood outage, meanwhile, included one individual complaining: "Robinhood not working again as usual."

The Interactive Brokers outage was reported by Downdetector at 7:05 a.m. ET, while the Robinhood outage was reported by Downdetector at 8:33 a.m. ET.

"Early this morning, we experienced a significant failure in multiple segments of a highly resilient data storage system," Interactive Brokers spokeswoman Kalen Holliday told ThinkAdvisor just before noon.

"We engaged the vendor for analysis and recovery," she said, adding: "We have mostly recovered and are addressing a few residual issues."

Just after noon, a Robinhood spokesperson told ThinkAdvisor: "This morning, some customers may have experienced a short disruption in trading due to a technical issue. It's now completely resolved."

Downdetector also reported an outage on TD Ameritrade's trading platform at 10:02 a.m. ET Monday. However, there were no complaints by users at Downdetector.com.

"Reports of an outage at TD Ameritrade this morning are inaccurate," TD spokeswoman Margaret Farrell told ThinkAdvisor at 11:05 a.m. "Clients are able to access their accounts and trades are being processed as usual across all TD Ameritrade platforms," she said.

About a month ago, as trading surged on vaccine news and a speech by President-elect Joe Biden, investors with Charles Schwab, E-Trade, TD Ameritrade and other brokerages experienced platform problems.

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