Trading App Robinhood Experiencing 'Major Outage' For a Second Day Amid Heavy Volume Market Action

Robinhood on Tuesday reported technical issues for a second day following an outage that kept clients from trading on a historic market rally. From a report: As U.S. stocks traded actively again in wake of a surprise Fed rate cut, Robinhood reported a "major outage" for trading across its platform. Earlier updates on the site said that all trading was "operational," but Twitter users posted screenshots of error messages as U.S. markets opened Tuesday. "We are experiencing a system-wide outage," a message on Robinhood's website read. Technical issues began Monday morning and lasted throughout the trading day, leaving users with their hands tied as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's biggest one-day point gain in history. In a volatile session Tuesday, stocks surged off their lows after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in an effort to stem slower economic growth from the coronavirus outbreak.

Leap Year Issue

[NFN_NLN]

The latest theory is that it was caused by a rookie leap year issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/softw... [reddit.com] ... And that this happened 4 years ago, last leap year and they didn't bother correcting the issue.

Re:

[OverlordQ]

That theory makes zero sense.

Re:

[NFN_NLN]

> That theory makes zero sense.

Oh, sorry, you don't know what a leap year is? Hopefully this helps:

leap year /lp yi()r/
noun
a year, occurring once every four years, that has 366 days including February 29 as an intercalary day.

Re:

[HungryMonkey]

That would be pretty remarkable given they were using a completely different backend 4 years ago. https://blog.robinhood.com/new... [robinhood.com] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/1... [cnbc.com]

Re:

[tlhIngan]

That would be pretty remarkable given they were using a completely different backend 4 years ago. https://blog.robinhood.com/new... [robinhood.com] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/1... [cnbc.com]

Why? It's one of the dangers of doing a rewrite from scratch - you lose all the bug fixes you've accumulated over time, so your new clean codebase is once again full of the same silly bugs that your old codebase had and was fixed years ago.

It's gotten to the point where the "start from scratch" is an anti-pattern of software development - not o

Re:

[onepoint]

Offtopic :

I believe in code clean up, not code rewrites.

starting with issuing the patch's first,
then issuing updates that are code bloat reduction to the end user,
and finalizing to clean up as optimization for speed increase,
then issuing those updates.

rinse and repeat.

why is it that no one likes these steps. I've never had a failure doing this

also, I do recall that I lost a great word processor back in the day
due to it trying a code rewrite ( wordstar I think it was called ) . boy I liked
that it worked so w

Re:

[khchung]

why is it that no one likes these steps. I've never had a failure doing this

Cleaning up code and making the users gradually more productive does not sound sexy to the CEO and won’t get your boss’s boss a raise/promotion, and won’t give him a huge budget to spend.

A multimillion, multi-year full rewrite, OTOH, would let him hire his buddies, spend money on vendors who could then give him gifts and offer him free business conferences in Switzerland ski resort. It would also pad his CV so he can hunt for the next company to “lead” a full rewrite. Rinse and

Re:

[onepoint]

thank you for your reply Oliver

Re:

[jtara]

Clearing system != trading system. Trading is real-time and what got bogged down. Clearing happens after the fact in fact after close of trading. It’s the settlement of the trades - I.e. the actual transfer of ownership. Trading is the initial agreement to transfer.

In old school parlance trading is the brokers yelling at each other on the floor and exchanging little slips of paper. Clearing is matching up the little slips of paper with customer accounts, waiting for customers to mail in certificates t

see-saw

[OrangeTide]

Everyone sell!
Everyone buy!
...
repeat until recession

Re:

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Everyone sell!
Everyone buy! ...
repeat until recession

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” - Benjamin Graham

This is not a dupe

[mobby_6kl]

Well kind of it is, but it's still down as of this moment so it's more of an updatel. You can check the current status here: https://status.robinhood.com/ [robinhood.com]

Sucks to be their user I guess, but IBKR also took like 10 minutes to provide me a 2fa code so it might be also because heavy trading due to covid-19 panic.

Re:

[nonBORG]

Too bad about your 10 minutes Hopefully it did not effect your trading too badly. This Robin hood outage is killer if you were trying to make moves in a rapidly changing market. Robin hood has basically changed the face of trading so that it is no trade fee for us all (I am using TD Ameritrade) I can imagine that many of their users will quit the platform now as you can get free accounts everywhere, and hopefully without outages.

Headline shortcomings

[magarity]

Hmm, this headline makes no mention of stealing from the poor or failing to sock it to the rich. Clearly the editors haven't had their morning coffee.

this is the outcome.

[onepoint]

it seems that many people want wealth for free, but no one is willing to commit their own personal resources towards
the development, just the venture capitalist. The VC take all the development risk, and sometimes they fail.

The consumer wants to make money, and it seems that the market demand for this product is very high. it's good to note
this platform discloses that bad things like lag can happen, and they did back in 1987 during the market crash, some
Quotron terminals were not responding ( I did not have

Re:

[nonBORG]

Actually the users who use Robin hood do pay for the service but how they pay is not through trade fees. Robin hood can catch them with the spread and with selling there order book and in other ways. Note that one of the other large Brokers said it got 40% of their income from trading fees. So there was still anther 60% there which you can look through their Earnings report to see where it comes from. The VC money at risk also gets a gain. No one gets a free ride but the no fees policy gave them a competiti

Who is responsible?

[martinX]

Sounds like someone wanted to stop people buying in to a rising stockmarket. Maybe they had orders to tamp down enthusiasm and keep people worried.