For those unaware TD Ameritrade was acquired by Schwab recently and in the year since the acquisition Schwab has had multiple days of outages. I was with TD for years without a single instance I can recall of being unable to access my account.
This is just absolute negligence and neglect of necessary technical investment from management. The only thing that will get their attention is people withdrawing funds and moving to better run brokerages, which is what I intend to do.
Schwab is overall a great bank and brokerage. Fidelity’s user experience quite frankly is much worse, as is E-Trade’s. Vanguard is even worse than those. IBKR looks nice, but the hassle hasn’t been worth it to me. Schwab has been great for me so far.
My experience was that my ToS desktop app was still logged in and kept an active connection, On my Android phone, the Schwab App was able to work (I only use it as a backup) while TOS (My more daily trading app) required me to wipe the local data to get logging in working again (A fix that was required last time Schwab messed up the log-in system).
Schwab has, in the last year or so, made their login much more complex to work with MFA across all apps. This probably have their log in servers doing a lot more work than they projected.
I think a lot of the newer banks/neobanks are pretty good both because they have less customers and therefore less stampeding herd issues and because they are a lot more oriented towards supporting fast scaling. I use Wealthfront and have enjoyed so far
OTOH, if you desire to go shopping for bargains, yeah, not being able to trade sucks.
I wonder if pre-emptively moving to a 24 hour trading market has helped reduce load on Robinhood
Not directly, but expanding the product scope may have placed additional selection pressure on engineering choices such that boring and stable options became more likely over time.
Robinhood down 15% this morning.
This seems like a common issue - even if backend systems can take the load, login systems all seem to have a lower TPS limit and have a lot of trouble during big surge events like this. It reminds me a lot of when a new video game releases where the issue is often the login servers being overloaded.
West Coast retail customers are out of luck.
To anyone looking to test this, once login again becomes possible: Response I've gotten from Schwab website to a wrong password is merely loading of a blank page, with an endless spinner on top.
It’s not that suspicious. Not everything is a conspiracy.
So it seems it is the login servers that are getting destroyed, which is expected, but also annoying that this happens anytime volatility spikes. You'd think they would be prepared by now. Or maybe it's "overlooked" to dampen panic selling by retail...
I’d hope we’re not talking about them simply not having enough CPU to bcrypt_compare() everyone’s passwords as they try to log in…
In-house service-wide rate limits that are too low?
Two-factor auth steps? (Third party providers may be rate limiting?)
Anti-fraud things? GeoIP lookups? Etc
Writing out logs of logins? Some login audit DB?
(Or is it not actually some login-specific service that is down?)
It’s the step where the system first sees the user and must establish identity, of course. But it’s also an attractive place for system designers to frontload complex logic that result in cache-priming or context-priming which the rest of the system depends upon. And then there’s DDOS, device status, account status, anti-fraud, throttles, etc.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/08/05/financial...
Downdetector also says E-trade high reports.
If it's true that all four had outages, that's going to need some explaining.
But I'm also keeping in mind that the source of the data is Downdetector user reports, presumably some percentage of which are user's own computer/networking problems or forgotten passwords, and presumably there will be a much higher number of people who rarely log in trying to do so, right after news that looks like possible imminent market crash.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5ykkryglp3t?post=asset%3Ad625...
But that doesn't make it right.
People not being able to sell/buy when they really want to (and should be able to) also lends itself to suspicions of retail/retirement investors being sheep to be shorn by professional investors, and the mad scramble of a market correction is when there's less pretense otherwise.
I really wonder how all of the major brokers could be having an issue. Is it just one of those "we haven't ever had a real market crash since we started this website in 2015, so let's not do a load test" kind of thing?
This is the third time in 3 weeks I've had login issues. The first two were massively delayed 2fa keys to my phone. They directly correlated to Azure issues and down time. I wouldn't be surprised if this was somehow related to yet another outage with one of their infrastructure providers.
