Robinhood Suffers Online Outage With Market Advancing After Rout

Julie Verhage and Annie Massa (Bloomberg) -- Robinhood Markets Inc. customers experienced technical issues on the company’s online service when U.S. markets opened on Monday morning.

“We’re experiencing downtime, and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible,” a Robinhood spokeswoman said in an email on Monday. She didn’t provide further details. As of 10:51 a.m., customers of the online brokerage were still having difficulty with the site.

Clients blasted the closely-held company on social media for not being able to make trades. “One of the most anticipated trading days and your service is down at market open,” one user wrote. Another user said: “What is going on -- I can’t do any trades -- you will lose me as customer going forward. This ridiculous.”

Downdetector, a website that tracks real-time outages online, reported the issue at the market open.

U.S. stocks headed for their first gain in eight sessions as investors assessed prospects that the Federal Reserve could intervene to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus. Last week, the S&P suffered the worst week for the benchmark since 2008.

During last week’s rout Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab Corp. customers experienced some technical issues.

Robinhood is based in Menlo Park, California.