Tech Problems on Merrill, Thinkorswim Trading Platforms Tick Off Investors

Only a few minutes earlier, at 9:54 a.m., thinkorswim tweeted: "we had a brief period where we saw slowness and charts not loading, this should now be much better."

One person who identified himself as a day trader tweeted at thinkorswim that he "lost $200 on your platform issues." Thinkorswim responded by asking him to "please chat us or call us so we can look into this."

A TD Ameritrade spokesperson told ThinkAdvisor at 11:56 a.m.: "Any reports of a thinkorswim outage are inaccurate. This morning at market open, there was a very short period where clients on the thinkorswim platform experienced a brief lag in their ability to view their account balance, quotes and positions, but the ability to trade was not impacted and the issue was quickly resolved. This issue did not impact any other TD Ameritrade platforms."

There were several outages and technical issues reported with the trading platforms of TD Ameritrade and Merrill Lynch, as well as Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Fidelity, Robinhood and Vanguard last year. They included technical issues with the Schwab and E-Trade platforms in December.

Schwab reported in November that an unspecified "technical issue" prevented at least some clients from being able to log into its online trading platform, while Downdetector said outages were also experienced by E-Trade, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Robinhood, TD Ameritrade and Vanguard.

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, thinkorswim experienced technical issues for several days. That followed multiple outages on the websites of TD Ameritrade and other financial firms earlier in 2020 that led several investors to take to Twitter to complain about trades they were unable to make and money they lost as a result.