Robinhood, the stock-trading app for millennials, experienced yet another service outage Monday as the markets took a historic dive, sparking outrage from furious customers.
Following back-to-back trading disruptions at the start of last week’s stock rollercoaster, the beleaguered app powered down again on Monday — a mere half-hour after stocks were briefly halted on the S&P 500 index’s heart-stopping 7 percent drop at the open.
“Trading is currently down on Robinhood and we’re investigating the issue,” the company tweeted from its customer service account @AskRobinhood at 10:06 a.m. Monday.
Trading didn’t resume again until 26 minutes before the Dow Jones industrial average closed down a scary 2,013 points as an oil price war fueled fears of a coronavirus-inspired economic slowdown.
“Trading has been restored and Robinhood is back up and running again,” Robinhood tweeted at 3:34 p.m.
That gave investors little time to prepare for the Dow to end the day down 7.79 percent to 23,851.02 — its worst percentage decline since Oct. 15 2008, when the Dow closed down 7.87 percent during the dark days of the financial crisis.
The S&P 500 index ended down 7.6 percent to 2,746.56, while the Nasdaq composite index closed down 7.29 percent to 7,950.68.
“Yup just like last week I’ve lost lots of money today because of those @RobinhoodApp @AskRobinhood clowns!,” @DiamondlouX tweeted before the market closed.
“@RobinhoodApp is a joke” tweeted user @Brett_Coitas. “You’ve been down on every major volatile day in the past few weeks. SEC & FINRA need to slap them hard for this or shut them down. It’s criminal that this has happened again. Yes, if you’re using [Robinhood] still, you deserve it.”
The app was excoriated just last week for going offline for nearly two full trading sessions on Monday and Tuesday — days of record-setting volatility — with technical outages that left more than 10 million customers in the dark.
Following last week’s outages, Robinhood’s co-founders Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev promised to do better.
“Many of you depend on Robinhood for your investments, and we’re personally committed to doing all we can to operate a stable service that’s available when you need it the most,” Bhatt and Tenev said last Tuesday.
