Ordinary investors were effectively locked out of their brokerage accounts on Monday as a top online trading platform, Interactive Brokers, was crippled by technical trouble.
The news coincided with a brief and apparently unrelated outage at Robinhood Markets, the one-click trading app whose popularity has surged during the pandemic. The twin outages infuriated many investors, who took to Twitter to excoriate the companies for cutting them off from the markets at the start of the week.
In my experience, outages on Monday are almost always caused by weekend maintenance. Don't know if its their back end provider or due to themselves. I guess we just wait or move to the backup account.
"Some of you experienced service interruptions or outages today due to a failure in IBKR’s systems, which are built upon a sophisticated “High Availability” data system provided and serviced by a leading technology vendor. The system was specifically designed to minimize the likelihood of the kind of technology failure that we experienced and it has performed well to date. Nonetheless, it did not work as expected today.
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Sophisticated == unreliable, nothing new.
While this outage may have been very painful for a lot of people, IB has been quite good over the years.
Success requires no deodorant! (Sun Tzu)
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