Robinhood Apologizes To Users For Outages, Offers Credit

Trading startup Robinhood has apologized to its members for outages that occurred earlier in March during a historic market rally, according to a report by CNBC.

The company wants to rebuild trust with its customers by offering them credits to make up for the outages, and said it fixed the issues that led to them in the first place, by strengthening company infrastructure.

On Monday (March 23), Robinhood emailed customers about the credits, along with an apology. The amount will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

“We’d like to start with the apology you deserve: We’re sorry for the recent outage on our platform. Your support is what helps us democratize finance for all, and we know we owe it to you to do better,” the company said. “An apology alone won’t rebuild your trust in us. Instead, we hope our actions will.”

The outage kept the app offline for almost two days in early March, and clients missed the largest one-day point gain in the history of the Dow Jones.

Last year, DST Global led a funding round for Robinhood that valued the company at $7.6 billion. Other companies, like Sequoia and New Enterprise Associates, are also investors. Robinhood’s traders are mostly millennials and it offers things like free equity and crypto trading.

The company said the outages were due to “historic market conditions” and a combination of record trading volume and sign-up, which it said “stressed” the infrastructure of the company. Before the email, Robinhood explained the issues but didn’t apologize.

Now, the company is saying that those problems have been fixed.

“Our engineering team has further strengthened and stabilized our systems and is continuing to work to minimize the risk of an outage like this from happening again,” the company said in the email.

Many customers were upset with the company over the outages, and a few threatened to sue. One man filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of himself and other clients claiming that the app failed to “provide a functioning platform.”