Robinhood Site Goes Down, Again

Users of the digital trading platform Robinhood have taken to social media once again to express their outrage about outages locking them out of a stock market rally on Monday (May 18), according to a report.

Although Robinhood said on Twitter that the service is operational (the tweet has since been removed), some of the platform’s 10 million users countered that they were still having issues. The startup unicorn also had outage issues in March on another busy trading day. The company said at the time that its customers would be compensated on a case-by-case basis.

Outages aside, Robinhood was valued at $8.3 billion following a $280 million Series F funding round earlier this month.

E-Trade, which was purchased by Morgan Stanley earlier this year for $13 billion, was also reportedly having service issues on Monday (May 18), some users said on Twitter. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that everything was working fine.

On March 4, Robinhood received complaints that a stock rally saw prices soar by more than 4 percent, but users were left out because the site was down. Stock and options traders across the platform were out of luck and perhaps out of the money (in terms of locking in gains). The same thing happened for part of the next day, when the trading platform was down again.

More outages were reported a week later, making three in roughly two weeks. Right after the opening bell on March 9, a historic day of trading with plunging prices in equities and oil, Robinhood said trading was inaccessible, and then that it was “partially restored.”

Based in Silicon Valley, Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Stanford University classmates Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev. Their goal was to create tools that would give everyone access to financial markets. The discount brokerage service offers investors commission-free trading.