Following a major technical outage, popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app Robinhood is purportedly operational again.
The popular platform for trading stocks and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) experienced a major technical outage, causing a loss of access to user accounts.
On Monday, March 2, Robinhood encountered a day-long technical problem with users purportedly being unable to complete their exchange orders or even load their portfolio lists and charts.
Robinhood still has not provided a clear reason behind the outage
Subsequently, Robinhood released an official statement on the matter, providing little information on what exactly happened exactly. Robinhood support team tweeted on March 2:
“We are still experiencing system-wide issues. Our team is continuing to work to resolve this and we’ll provide updates as they become available. We apologize again for the trouble this has caused and appreciate your patience with us as we work to resume service.”
While some reports suggested that the tech outage on Robinhood was caused by a significant surge of trading volumes on the platform, the firm has not publicly linked the issue with trading volumes. After Robinhood’s user base crossed 10 million accounts in late 2019, the exchange has allegedly seen its active users skyrocket since early January 2020.
Cointelegraph contacted Robinhood team to find out more details about the possible reason behind the system outage but did not receive an immediate response. This article will be updated pending any new information.
The outage is fixed but traders want reimbursement
Despite Robinhood purportedly fixing the issue — the status page indicates that all basic trading and banking services are operational as of press time — the recent outage has apparently caused some tangible losses for traders. Some traders complained that the outage on Robinhood caused them to miss out on “the biggest one-day point gain in the Dow Jones history.”
While some users want to file a complaint with major United States regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, others suggested that they would take a legal class action against Robinhood.
Robinhood Class Action, a twitter account that has been created in response to the damaging outage, has amassed nearly 4,800 followers as of press time.
In late December, Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev revealed that more than 200,000 Robinhood clients were already in line for its new fractional stock trading app. Valued at $7.6 billion to date, the Robinhood app is known in the crypto community for featuring zero-commission cryptocurrency transactions.
Robinhood is not the only major crypto firm that has faced a major technical issue in recent days. In mid-February, major cryptocurrency exchange Binance halted trading on its platform to resolve an unexpected technical issue.