Robinhood Provides Discount To Make Up For Outage

After its systems went down as the markets bounced back from the most unfavorable week as of the financial crisis in 2008, the Robinhood trading app vowed to offer compensation for users. The app was not up and running on Monday, as the Dow increased by over 1,293 points or by 5 percent, TheNextWeb reported.

Robinhood said in an e-mail, according to the report, “When it comes to your money, issues like this are not acceptable. We realize we let you down, and our team is committed to improving your experience.” According to reports, the company is to provide a discount on subscriptions of $15 as a way to make up for the outage. The company says the move is a “first step” per reports and will eventually reach out to users to look into further compensation.

Technical errors meant that many users could not have taken advantage of potential financial gains on Monday. Tuesday morning also saw downtime from 6 to 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time, while the cut in the Fed Reserve rate started to move the markets to lose the increases. The app is now reportedly up and running.

While speculation has circulated about the downtime’s cause, an official Twitter account for Robinhood blamed “highly volatile and historic market conditions” and “record account sign-ups” as well as “record volume” per the report. Robinhood noted in a post that read, in part, “We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load.”

As previously reported, Robinhood underwent a massive outage on Monday (March 2). The firm told its clients on Monday, “We are experiencing a system-wide outage. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.” A message by Robinhood to clients said, “Your portfolio information is not available right now. Please check back later.”

California-based Robinhood became popular with younger investors when it offered free trading in 2013. The firm said in December that it had 10 million users.