The stock market is down due to the coronavirus outbreak and the slide has continued into March. However, the Dow isn’t the only one having troubles. Robinhood status is on watch after its third major outage in the past seven days.
The investing app is currently the leader in mobile stock trading. This includes competition such as Cash App, SoFi Investing and Axos Invest.
Unfortunately, Robinhood is now facing legal trouble. A lawsuit is on the way after its 10 million users suffered from an extensive outage on March 2nd.
Robinhood Status Outages Becoming More Frequent
March 2nd was actually a record-breaking day for the market. The Dow rose nearly 1,300 points, while the Nasdaq gained 384 points and the S&P 500 added 136 points. This surprised many investors after the recent drops due to coronavirus scares. And rightfully so, as the market is continuing to be unpredictable due to COVID-19.
The surges must have caught the Robinhood app off guard as well. The app’s massive outage caused a world of problems for its users. This included two days of glitches and functionality problems. Moreover, the issues weren’t specific to the mobile app, as both the company’s website and help center also suffered from similar outages.
The end result is a class action lawsuit that was filed on March 4th at the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida. The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages.
Robinhood status hasn’t improved in the days since its first major outage. In fact, they have faced two further setbacks to their services.
The most recent outage came on March 9th. The stock market saw another plunge due to faltering oil prices and more coronavirus fears that day. This led to a massive sell-off and trading was halted for 15 minutes that morning. Trading reopened at 9:49 a.m. ET, but the Robinhood app went down just two minutes later.
Within the next hour, Robinhood announced they had identified the problem and a fix was being implemented. Yet, trading wasn’t restored until 3:34 p.m. ET.
What is Causing the Robinhood App Outages?
With three outages now behind us, Robinhood was quick to release a statement on the matter. The press release came after the first two outages, mainly addressing the major issues on March 2nd.
“Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages,” the press release stated. “The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions, record volume and record account sign-ups.”
So, there does seem to be a positive here. Not only are more people signing up for Robinhood at “record” rates, but the company is also being very clear with its customer base.
“Our team has spent the last two days evaluating and addressing the issue,” the release also noted. “We worked as quickly as possible to restore service, but it took us a while. Too long.”
Since the press release, Robinhood status has fared well until March 9th. The company hasn’t released any information regarding the cause of the most recent outage. However, it did affect equities, options and cryptocurrency trading for nearly seven hours.
Can We Expect More Outages?
Up until now, Robinhood has a squeaky-clean resume. The application itself hasn’t had to deal with many problems since its launch in March of 2015. Even with new features added on over the years, its continued to run efficiently.
However, the outages this month are quite telling. It took the company much too long to identify and address the issues. And, more issues have arisen since.
With the market being volatile at the moment, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more hiccups with Robinhood. Make sure to watch Robinhood status closely over the next few weeks.
Robinhood Status Going Forward
Are you interested in investing with Robinhood? Despite their recent outages, the popular trading app is drawing in younger investors on a daily basis.
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These applications are great resources for new investors and Robinhood is still the gold standard. Despite Robinhood status problems of late, their interface is as good as it gets.