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Comment by sjc33 | Hacker News Reader

I just got an email from Robinhood support on the outage, half an hour before markets close.

I don't actively use RH as my main brokerage so not a big deal to me, but obviously this is unacceptable. Don't recall any other online brokerage suffering an outage like this.

Suffice to say this throws cold water on any mystic around Robinhood having better tech that any incumbent.

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This is the problem with startup companies, they think too much about product and too little on communications.

This is very poor communication, sending an outage mail after hours it had occurred, with no ETA for the fix , and absolutely no details on what has happened i.e a hack , or a DDOS, or an infra outage etc.

I’m not so sure you can say this is just a “startup” problem.

Don't recall any other online brokerage suffering an outage like this.

Brokerage firms have outages with surprising regularity. I remember Sharebuilder being particularly bad, but Vanguard was down for a bit last week. A whole day though is pretty spectacular.

Other brokerages also support trading over the phone in the event of an online platform failure. Robinhood doesn't, and their email support system was bouncing emails due to high volume of incoming mail.

Vanguard was down for 2 minutes that’s way different than a whole trading day.

Vanguard was down for around 30 minutes by my count with no status updates.

No even in the same ballpark of fuckup as being down an entire trading day will _zero_ information as to why.

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