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Robinhood reports outage as markets rebound
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- leet_thow 7y agoIf you want to glimpse the sentiment of their customers at the moment, check out the thread at /r/wallstreetbets: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fcfuux/robinhood_crash_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fcfuux/robi...
- rodgerd 7y agoWhat have /r/wallstreetbets done this time?
- strbean 7y agoThey've been locked out of the market all day, and we get a big uptick. Coincidence? /s
- sjc33 7y agoI just got an email from Robinhood support on the outage, half an hour before markets close. I don't actively use RH as my main brokerage so not a big deal to me, but obviously this is unacceptable. Don't recall any other online brokerage suffering an outage like this. Suffice to say this throws cold water on any mystic around Robinhood having better tech that any incumbent.
- totaldude87 7y agoThis is the problem with startup companies, they think too much about product and too little on communications. This is very poor communication, sending an outage mail after hours it had occurred, with no ETA for the fix , and absolutely no details on what has happened i.e a hack , or a DDOS, or an infra outage etc.
- danielg6 7y agoI’m not so sure you can say this is just a “startup” problem.
- inferiorhuman 7y agoDon't recall any other online brokerage suffering an outage like this. Brokerage firms have outages with surprising regularity. I remember Sharebuilder being particularly bad, but Vanguard was down for a bit last week. A whole day though is pretty spectacular.
- gburdell3 7y agoOther brokerages also support trading over the phone in the event of an online platform failure. Robinhood doesn't, and their email support system was bouncing emails due to high volume of incoming mail.
- bostonfincs 7y agoVanguard was down for 2 minutes that’s way different than a whole trading day.
- inferiorhuman 7y agoVanguard was down for around 30 minutes by my count with no status updates.
- chance_state 7y agoNo even in the same ballpark of fuckup as being down an entire trading day will _zero_ information as to why.
- glouwbug 7y agoGuess they weren't ready for the massive amounts of requests coming from a world record market correction / recession. That, or they released a bunch of new features over the weekend. Why we are building highly sensitive monetary performance based applications under the guise of agile and electron is beyond me. The app market needs a market correction in design. IEEE, military, aerospace, or aviation design standardizing comes to mind.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIf Robinhood wants to target their app towards people who want a fluid interface and neat graphs, compromising on the always-up needs of day traders, I don't see why that's wrong.
- EpicEng 7y agoIt's a trading app that is... down for an entire day of trading. That seems like the wrong sort of compromise to make. The number one priority of anyone who is actively trading is... to be able to trade. Not even mentioning the other hilarious bugs this company has let out into the wild. They don't seem to have a good grasp on what they're doing, and now many other, more mature brokerages offer zero fee trades. Their time is coming.
- pjc50 7y ago> Why we are building highly sensitive monetary performance based applications under the guise of agile and electron is beyond me. It's cheaper. This is not complicated. The entire society is orientated to getting the most for least. Excessive effort in quality is a waste. Besides, the "serious" people hardly fared better. The notorious TSB failure, for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tsb-it-failure-cost-compensation-customers-switch-current-account-a8757821.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tsb-it-fail...
- EpicEng 7y agoThese guys just took $323 million in a series E. They're valued at 7.6B (well, they were...) Can't afford better engineers?
- pfarnsworth 7y agoThe biggest question is whether or not their systems were able to execute margin calls. If they were down this long, that to me suggests data got corrupt and they've been restoring from backups, etc, which means maybe all their services were inactive. If that's the case then could the margin system be active, or are people (and potentially RH) sitting on oversized losses if they were short today? What happens tomorrow if their margins kick in and sell at the open, and then the market drops? Lots of very interesting questions that need to be answered.
- Tiksi 7y agoI tried to clear all user data for RobinHood off my phone this morning and login fresh. At first I got absolutely nothing, but eventually my stocks and options came up, then my watchlist. However the watchlist was missing everything I added to it yesterday, though if I look up a symbol directly it does show as added. So I think your theory of restoring from backups has some merit. I wonder how they'll reconcile any orders placed/executed after the backup was taken if that's the case.
- ra7 7y agoThey have been down basically the entire day. Are they going to face some action? I'm unclear who even punishes them for potentially causing millions of dollar losses for customers.
- Willson50 7y agoThe SEC does.
- ra7 7y agoPardon my ignorance, but what are SEC rules for things like this? Do they expect some reasonable availability for trading platforms or do they consider massive outages like this "negligence"?
- turc1656 7y agoMy limited understanding is that if you have a license to be a broker in this nature, you have to meet certain requirements. Similar to getting a bank charter - banks have to be open all standard business days during certain hours. Things may happen from time to time that are unexpected - like a massive snow storm that closes the bank for the day or at least part of the day. I imagine the rules are similar - you must be able to have your clients trade during normal market hours. The regulators understand there can be unexpected events that put systems down unexpectedly (high volume, bug that crashes the system, etc.) and are generally pretty understanding. But I think something like this where they are down the whole day (and STILL down from the looks of their status page, though they claim to have identified the issue), could easily earn them a fine from the regulators for not meeting the license/charter requirements.
- esmi 7y agoProbably only if there is some type of class action law suit. If customers actually lost millions due to robinhood’s negligence then there is almost certainly going to be one.
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- henryw 7y agoDo they compensate their customers for this?
- farisjarrah 7y agoNo, there is absolutely no recourse for any losses incurred while using their platform.
- chatmasta 7y agoHow would that work? If I’m holding a stock and it tanks while RH is down, why wouldn’t I claim I was planning on selling it? Now if I had a trade scheduled ahead of time to execute during the down time, that seems like a more justifiable case for compensation.
- skinnymuch 7y agoUnless you had a trade scheduled, how would that work? Any one can say they wanted to buy or sell something with the benefit of hindsight
- xenihn 7y agoFree AMD calls.
- elwell 7y agoBeing down for an entire trading day is pretty crazy. I can't imagine what's going over there today in the engineering & devops teams. Depending on where the issue is, there might be thousands+ of orders to reconcile (manually?). It will be really interesting to read a post-mortem engineering blog post if they make one.
- intuitionist 7y agoThey don’t seem like serious enough professionals to release a postmortem. Did they do so for the “infinite leverage” bug? I have a couple grand in play money in Robinhood, because hey, zero commissions, but it’s clearly not sustainable for the long term. I’m glad my real investments are all safely parked at Vanguard, where I likely wouldn’t even notice if the brokerage seized up for a day.
- dzader 7y agojust FYI I believe every other major US broker offers zero commissions now
- solarkraft 7y agoDo they all make the money selling trading data do HFT companies now?
- nscalf 7y agoThe biggest impact Robinhood has had is pushing other brokers to go to zero commission models. I joined before that happened, but I will be moving my trading portfolio elsewhere.
- CSSer 7y agoI’m surprised more people on here aren’t using something like https://alpaca.markets https://alpaca.markets. It’s primarily for algo trading, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it generally, as it is an API, after all.
- iask 7y agoAs of 3:44PM EST. It’s still not back. I then signed out of the app and can’t sign back in. I then thought maybe they reset passwords, so I tried resetting. Even that’s not working. Total outage!
- booleandilemma 7y agoReset passwords? They’re not MoviePass :)
- Animats 7y agoAt Robinhood, you're not the customer. You're the product.[1] Robinhood makes their money by selling order flow to high-frequency traders. Robinhood doesn't charge commissions, but the price is slightly worse. [1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4212397-robinhood-high-frequency-trading-scandal-plot-thickens https://seekingalpha.com/article/4212397-robinhood-high-freq...
- gmm1990 7y agoHow do you think most brokerages fill orders? I'd rather get filled at the best price possible, which I assume a high frequency firm would be able to do better than some other filling method. Pretty sure most brokerages do this anyway.
- gmm1990 7y agoSorry thinking about this more, I guess the actual best price at the stock exchanges would be preferable
- tptacek 7y agoInternalizers can quote better prices than the exchange NBBO; you don't have to guess: when you're buying, the lower price is the better one.
- intuitionist 7y agoReg NMS prevents HFTs from filling your order outside of the NBBO. if anything you’ll get slightly more favorable prices from a market maker, since they know you’re a retail trader who’s not going to run them over.
- gmm1990 7y agoYeah that makes sense then. I have been using Robinhood cause I figured it wouldn't matter anyway the latency differences between click trading and their algos are so large. But I won't be after the outage today.
- nostromo 7y agoReading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today. They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to read that they’re insolvent someday after a big, unexpected move.
- danhak 7y agoThere’s nothing unintentional about the hilarity. That community is totally self-aware and rife with in-jokes and satire. The folks that post there see their gambling for what it is.
- nostromo 7y agoI think there's a mix of in-on-the-joke and not. I've read some sad stories about, for example, a student betting student loan money in the market and losing it instantly, lured to make risky bets from the other stories of dumb luck success. Here's someone I don't think is in on the joke: https://i.redd.it/at7gloeb5ck41.jpg https://i.redd.it/at7gloeb5ck41.jpg ... oops
- ethbro 7y agohmm, i wondeR if reddiT Has somE Depressing histOry of coNfusing sAtiricaL content with the real worlD.
- remote_phone 7y agoIt’s a obnoxious to know nothing about the culture of wallstreetbets and then to make declarations as if you know after reading a few posts. Posts like that are par for the course. Its called “Loss Porn”. The subreddit is absolutely geared towards stock/options trading as gambling and if you think otherwise then you’re wrong. They are very self-aware and do it for fun. And yes some may lose a lot of money but they know exactly what they are getting themselves involved in.
- beezle 7y agoI don't understand the attraction of Robinhood over the likes of TD or Etrade. TD minimum balance is $50 (the minimum transfer) and Etrade $500. Both are well vetted brokers with additional features and services. If you are investing, how sexy the app is (if you only use a phone) shouldn't matter. If you are day trading from a phone app (except in emergency), you are, IMHO, delusional.
- usaar333 7y agoMost people who believe they can profit day trading are delusional to begin with. If you are just doing it to gamble (for fun), a sexy app that lets you gamble easier on the fly better can well be worth it.
- sjc33 7y agoMy theory is that this was a leap year bug.
- ceedan 7y agoOr because Sunday starts daylight savings time.
- sjc33 7y agoLeap year is a more likely snag here.
- notyourday 7y agoThat's next Sunday
- Moeancurly 7y agoYou could very well be right, according to this[0] post on Twitter: > Hey @RobinhoodApp did someone forget to add isleap() to your python module? Imagine losing thousands of dollars because someone didn’t code for the leap year. It’s looking for 3/03 data and throwing errors out the ass. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESIuB4nXYAAYImF?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESIuB4nXYAAYImF?format=jpg [0]: https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048 https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048
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- ab_io 7y agoThis is starting to look like a customer extinction level incident — Any idea which competing service their users / wsb will likely move to?
- ithinkinstereo 7y agowebull and thinkorswim will probably be the two biggest beneficiaries today.
- nscalf 7y agoOne of the biggest lessons here is not to use tech-forward brokers. I see a lot of people talking about how swapping from robinhood to webull is ridiculous, and I honestly agree. I'm personally thinking of going TD or thinkorswim.
- ithinkinstereo 7y agoYep, fuddy-duddy tech = safe tech.
- addcninblue 7y agoNote that thinkorswim is owned by TD, so it's effectively the same platform.
- skinnymuch 7y agoGoing to Webull seems super silly if the issue is mobile/web 2.0+ startup brokers.
- bostonfincs 7y agoI see think or swim and TD/Fidelity being biggest beneficiaries webull seems like more of the same.
- inferiorhuman 7y agoIf they really went all in on risky options contracts... Burger King.
- champagnepapi 7y agoI was getting ready to buy a bunch of calls this morning via Robinhood. I hit the "submit" button on the trade, and nothing happened. VERY disappointing experience. When it comes to applications like this, downtime is critical. Haven't been able to place a trade all day.
- haberdasher 7y agohttps://status.robinhood.com/ https://status.robinhood.com/
- lwb 7y agoAaaand, there's already a twitter account trying to build a class action lawsuit against Robinhood for allowing an outage to happen. Wonder if this'll go anywhere! https://twitter.com/ClassRobinhood https://twitter.com/ClassRobinhood
- daenz 7y agoWhat are the odds that this was a cyberterrorism attack? If you can predict this kind of market event (the bounce back), and you want to hurt a company and its users, you would simply DDoS at the right time.
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- kaffeemitsahne 7y agoIf you can predict this kind of market event I imagine you've got better things to do.
- sombremesa 7y agoWell, all you have to predict is that the market will move - the direction wouldn't matter much, since the brokerage has customers trying to do both calls and puts.
- EpicEng 7y agoMuch lower than the odds of incompetence.
- WrathOfJay 7y agoI remember when Schwab went down just as Facebook went public. Couldn't cancel my order, ended up with the stock at a much higher price and the stock had dropped by a lot by the time I had access again. I can't help but be suspicious of events like this.
- halotrope 7y agoApparently leap day is the cause: https://mobile.twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048 https://mobile.twitter.com/jtech63/status/123460004578739404... Also rumor has it they “lost user data and the backups are not working as expected” Edit: This is the tweet. Not sure if it is legit: https://mobile.twitter.com/classrobinhood/status/1234577426488811520 https://mobile.twitter.com/classrobinhood/status/12345774264...
- pfarnsworth 7y agoThis looks like a terrible source. I would wait until they issue a statement.
- halotrope 7y agoVery true! Unfortunately RH went completely dark. I sincerely hope they fix the issue and provide a post mortem.
- vsareto 7y agoIf this is true and nothing happens to this company, everyone should feel free to use bugs to cover up any and all IT negligence.
- Craighead 7y agoAre you blaming the lack of programming logic around leap years on IT?
- halotrope 7y agoI doubt it will be possible to just shake it off as there is likely millions of dollars lost for customers. Not in some abstract way like when github goes down but literally because people cannot close out positions and options expire. If it is really just a leap year bug It should be gross negligence. Not sure if their TOS will hold then.
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- richardknop 7y agoStill down. Entire trading day outage.
- cft 7y agoSomewhat related, they ruined their app for me last week by adding the "lists". Instead of I instantly visible scrollable symbols I am interested in trading, the app now presents a bunch of "expand" and "add new list" controls, that when expanded show abridged lists with "click to see more". That totally ruined its main differentiator as an "easy app". Additionally the update was shoddy: due to a memory leak the scrolling eventually becomes very slow.
- syedrezaali 7y agofuck you robinhood
- syedrezaali 7y agoTo the founders of Robinhood, FUCK YOU ALL, HOPE YA'LL PAY FOR THIS.
- bunchOfCucks 7y agoGeeks should stop reinventing wheels all the time. Things get bloated for a reason.