Four online brokers said they resolved disruptions on their platforms Monday after a morning of glitches affected thousands of customers.
Robinhood Financial, which had problems related to equities, options and cryptocurrency trading, said shortly after noon in New York that the issues were fixed. TD Ameritrade, Vanguard and Charles Schwab also reported difficulties, including slowness with websites and mobile apps, that resulted in user complaints.
Clients eager to make trades on the last day of the month were stymied as U.S. markets opened. Speculation online focused on whether some of the problems were related to Apple and Tesla stock splits that took effect Monday.
This morning, some customers were experiencing issues with delayed order status updates. We’ve resolved the issue and Robinhood is operational. We apologize and thank you for your patience.
This morning, some customers were experiencing issues with delayed order status updates. We’ve resolved the issue and Robinhood is operational. We apologize and thank you for your patience.
— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) August 31, 2020
Self-guided traders stuck home during the COVID-19 pandemic have helped give online brokers a boost this year. Second-quarter retail U.S. equity trading volume surged more than 50% from the preceding three-month period, according to Larry Tabb, head of market structure research for Bloomberg Intelligence.
While online brokerages routinely experience brief outages, it’s rarer for several of them to happen simultaneously. Downdetector
Judy Burns, a U.S. SEC spokeswoman, declined to comment, and a spokesperson for FINRA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Robinhood, which has helped lead gains in online trading this year, is the subject of an investigation by regulators into its handling of an outage in March, Bloomberg News reported Monday.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the latest disruptions are related. Vanguard said full access to its websites, mobile apps and phones had been restored and apologized to customers. Schwab also said problems that made its website intermittently inaccessible for some clients had been fixed.
—With assistance from Matt Robinson
