Schwab users are unable to log in | Hacker News Reader

Schwab users are unable to log in

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89 pointsajoseps67 comments

Completely unacceptable.

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.

What are the "better run" brokerages? Any examples you suggest?

I don’t love robinhood as a company but functionally it works really well most of the time.

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

Robinhood? You mean the company that halted trading of Gamestop stock and lied about why? I don't know, maybe their app isn't "broken" but it certainly isn't reliable.

Right that’s what I was getting at by saying “don’t love them as a company but the app works”…

Today around 9am (Eastern time), Robinhood retroactively canceled all orders filled(!) between 1:45am and 4am.

wat

Personally, i've never had any issues w/ Fidelity.

I've used www.firstrade.com for decades now. Not a well known name, but extraordinarily reliable.

IBKR?

I have been a Scwhab customer for years and have never had any issue logging in.

I’ve been a Schwab user for years, and was a TDA user as well before the merger. TDA had just as many issues like this. Don’t let your recency bias fool you.

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.

I'm a bit surprised at the short term memory as well. TDA, and Think Or Swim before that all had outages on Occasion.

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.

As a long-time Schwab user, one thing I was shocked by is that the login flow silently truncates the password to eight characters. I found this since I tend to have complex suffixes I rotate around, and one day I was able to login with the wrong suffix and even with no suffix at all. This must be due to some legacy process only allowing eight characters.

That's surprising and alarming. Thank you for bringing that up, though!

Grounds for class action litigation?

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.

Retail getting killed while institutions sell off. Is this something SEC will get involved with? This is like a bank stress test only for brokerages.

It's an interesting topic. I'm sure this is just excess server load and nothing nefarious but could the SEC mandate an SLA? Require disclosure of their DataDog dashboard?

The SEC does mandate SLAs and have for years. They’ll pay a hefty fine for this is my understanding

they don't care about fines, they are orders of magnitude less than the opportunity cost.

Now we know how our zero-fee transactions became possible.

They haven't the last half dozen times.

In this scenario, who are the institutions selling to?

Other institutions, retail whose brokers didn’t fail. Most activity on the markets in terms of volume would generally be, broadly, institution v institution anyway.

I’m not saying it makes it right, but retail is probably better off sitting tight for now. If anything, pros and institutions already had those sell orders ready to fire last night and would get in ahead of retail on market open, at least that’s my guess. So I don’t know what good it would have done me to be at the end of the line to sell my retail stuff.

OTOH, if you desire to go shopping for bargains, yeah, not being able to trade sucks.

More widespread than just Schwab, multiple platforms including vanguard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41161502

Yeah, haven't been able to get into Vanguard all morning, looks like they're trying to load their older HTML version.

Both Fidelity and Schwab were fine for me on devices where I was already logged in, but logging into a new device wasn’t working.

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.

Maybe logins are being throttled deliberately, to protect the transaction servers -- to which all institutional clients are already logged in.

West Coast retail customers are out of luck.

I can't login on a device i always use, so the failure is more complex than your sample

I’m not sure how the inability to login is “more complex”. I clearly state in my comment that logging in wasn’t working.

Revalidating session data could be a smaller surface area than validating a fresh login. But if logging in existing devices works in some cases, and doesn't in others, the failure case is more complex than just fresh logins don't work.

Ah, yes, my original comment was a little unclear. I actually wasn’t logging in on new device vs existing device, it was that I had logged in to one device before 9:30est (presumably before the surge began) and just had an existing already-logged-in-session.

Schwabb is 100% down, can’t even get in contact with support because their phone line and chat is down

Somehow I was able to stay logged into schwab (checked markets at 6am EST) and it's working without a hitch on the other side of login, I was able to make trades at open.

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...

It's almost like nobody unique indexes the username column anymore.

Will probably save a lot of people money by inhibiting panic selling for losses.

On the other hand, it's also preventing people from buying shares and capitalizing on the downturn.

I was planning on opening accounts with Schwab, but after I signed up and went through the login process, I very quickly closed the account and went elsewhere. It was among the worst user experiences I can recall. Everything about it screamed legacy and immutable. I had the same feeling about LastPass a few years ago. Always go with the gut!

We could say that people not able to access their accounts right now means less panic-selling by retirement account owners, so fewer people locking in their losses.

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.

Does anyone on the inside know, when people talk about login services being down, what’s the actual technical bottleneck?

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?)

“Login” is such a misnomer. It sounds like a password check (==read) but includes write activities of various kinds and complex can’t-skip logic.

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.

"Financial Sites Including Schwab, Fidelity, And Vanguard Experience Outages As Stocks Decline"

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.

It’s not the login that’s the problem. On two accounts, I could login to Fidelity just fine. Displaying balances and positions threw an error, however.

seems like fidelity is also affected: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/online-trading-plat...

There goes thinking we had any sort of resiliency in the retail stock market...

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?

FWIW Interactive Brokers is working fine (so far) but, geez, is it a rock'n'roll day!

Yes tws is printing numbers like crazy. Happy to be with solid broker :-D

Vanguard is also affected for me.

Yesterday, I was able to successfully log in before the market opened without issues. My session timed out and it took me four tries to get logged in. I was able to finally get a confirmation code and complete the login process after about 10 minutes. This was mid-morning.

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.

There's a good reason you want to avoid holding significant margin over the weekend, or even over night. Anyways, there will be plenty of good deals going on sale this week. The market is granting opportunity this week. If you're not on margin and looking to be fast then just ignore and keep adding to your investment accounts as you have been.

Vanguard is down as well. What a racket

I wonder if this has anything to do with the massive global sell-off?

It absolutely does - Fidelity, Vanguard, eTrade, and others are also having issues to some degree.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5ykkryglp3t?post=asset%3Ad625...

Bloomberg Surveillance daily before-opening podcast: None this morning, not on Apple mobile.

They learned this from Coinbase.

The current market is pretty red... I'm no conspiracy theorist, but isn't it suspicious that two major brokers (Schwab and Vanguard) are down?

Someone in this thread reported Fidelity being down too. This is a bit suspicious indeed.

It’s the largest trading volume day in years and everyone that isn’t living under a rock is trying to log into their banks to check their portfolio. The banks can’t handle the surge logging in.

It’s not that suspicious. Not everything is a conspiracy.

mobile apps seem to be working just fine

Amusing that Robinhood is working

I wonder if pre-emptively moving to a 24 hour trading market has helped reduce load on Robinhood

Except Robinhood halted 24 hr trading last night https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/robinhood-h...

Ah, probably wise with the expected massive divergence in price discovery. Well, nothing explained fully, thanks

That has nothing to do with Robinhood and everything to do with BOATS, their off exchange provider.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HOOD/

Robinhood down 15% this morning.

That’s a non sequitur

> 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.

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