Robinhood says that an “unprecedented load” is to blame for a system-wide failure that knocked its free-trading app offline on Monday.
Another Robinhood outage slammed traders once again on Tuesday as US stocks saw a historic rally that pushed the Dow up 1,294 points, the most in its history, following the Fed’s emergency rate cut. But users of the popular trading platform were left on the sidelines as the mobile app choked, unable to handle an influx of customers rushing to trade.
As Robinhood sputtered, with a user base of 10 million, the markets gained $1.1 trillion, reports TechCrunch.
In a blog post Tuesday, the fintech giant says that the stress on their infrastructure led to a “thundering herd” effect that caused their DNS to fail. According to the post,
“Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups.”
Robinhood states that they are working on improving the infrastructure so it can better handle the increased load.
“After a brief outage [Tuesday] morning, our trading platform was stable for the remainder of the day. As our engineering team works to upgrade our infrastructure, we may experience additional brief outages, but we’re now better positioned to more quickly resolve them.”
After updating their status to “back on online” on Tuesday, the start-up says they’re answering questions as quickly as possible, and are committed to operating a stable system.
The company reports,
“Robinhood is now fully restored. We know this has been frustrating and we will work diligently to provide the level of service you deserve.”
The fintech giant is reportedly reaching out to affected customers to offer compensation on a “case-by-case” basis and will provide a full three-months credit for Robinhood Gold subscription members.
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