Outrage against Robinhood over Unprecedented Load on System
Robinhood Markets Inc, a financial services company based in the United States, is having a rough for the beginning of March due to experiencing on Monday a system-wide out stage for its stock trading app that left most of its users with the inability to access their accounts.
This resulted in many of its customers being livid and one group of traders collecting signatures in support of filing civil litigation against the stock-buying app. The big question many users had was simply why this happened.
Several theories were floated around over what caused the app to crash – one of those was due to it being a Leap Day while others pointed towards higher than average volumes in trade. However, to address the issue and crash, Robinhood’s co CEO’s and founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev a blog post released an official statement stating:
“Our team has spent the last two days evaluating and addressing this issue. We worked as quickly as possible to restore service, but it took us a while. Too long. We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure—which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system. 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.”
What will Robinhood to next?
The question is, what Robinhood is doing next on addressing this issue. The company has said it is taking steps to contact its customers with contact information to allow the company to work on a case by case basis and could include customers receiving billing credits and possibly, other potential compensation.
Speaking on the work being carried out, co-ceo’s Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev stated in their blog post that: “Our team is continuing to work to improve the resilience of our infrastructure to meet the heightened load we have been experiencing. We’re simultaneously working to reduce the interdependencies in our overall infrastructure. We’re also investing in additional redundancies in our infrastructure.
Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev added:“After a brief outage this 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.”
