Robinhood Trading Platform Resumes Trading After Shutdown For Entire Day

Retail trading platform Robinhood said early Tuesday that its platforms are live again, after its customers missed on a majority of the trading session on Monday.

What Happened

"Robinhood is currently back up and running," it said in a statement on Twitter. "We're testing through the night, and you may observe some downtime as we prepare for tomorrow." The California-based company further said that issues like the outage are "not acceptable." "If you're a customer, we're sending you info on how to contact us so we can work with you directly to address your concerns," Robinhood added. Robinhood's trading platform was down across operating systems on Monday, including its iOS, Android and web apps.

According to the status page on the Robinhood website, only cryptocurrency trading was operational, as both equities and options trading continues to suffer the outage. At press time, all trading across platforms is currently "operational," per the status page.

Why It Matters

A Robinhood spokesperson told TechCrunch that they started experiencing downtime issues across platforms on Monday "morning at market open."

The platform failed at a volatile time for trading. Dow Jones gained 1,294 points on Monday, the highest in history, at 26,703.32. Nasdaq surged 4.5% at 8,952.17 and S&P 500 index jumped 4.6% at 3,090.23.

The markets were recovering from a week of continued losses over the rise of COVID-19 cases in the United States and other countries, even as they seemed to slow down in mainland China. The Federal Reserve on Friday suggested rate cuts to help revive the economy, instilling a fresh wave of optimism in the market.

"It's frustrating. You're just sitting there, stuck on the sidelines," Detroit-based trader Vivek Sevak told CNBC. "I had to watch those ETF prices go down and just eat the losses."

CNBC noted that the Robinhood terms and conditions agreed on by the users when they sign up on the app outline the company not being responsible for any losses due to technical outage, giving them little chance of a legal victory. But calls for class-action lawsuits against the trading platform cropped up on Twitter anyway.

Photo Credit: Robinhood.com