The stock-trading app Robinhood has been suffering from technical difficulties and went down on Monday, which has been another difficult day for Wall Street: At the time of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial average had taken a 1,900-point nosedive, with continuing fears about the impact the coronavirus will have on the economy and global markets. The app was unavailable for around one hour, but service has since been partially restored.
Trading has been partially restored on Robinhood and our team is working to get our platform fully back up and running. We’ll update the status page with the latest: https://t.co/mON07oWvHy
— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) March 9, 2020
According to the official Robinhood help Twitter account, trading has been partially restored and the app’s engineers are working to restore full functionality. As stated on the app’s status page: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The problems affected equities, options, and crypto trading via the app from approximately 6:30 a.m. PT to 7:30 a.m PT on Monday.
This comes after technical difficulties hampered the app last week as well. Last Monday, the app went down for nearly 4 hours, impacting users who rely on it for access to financial information. The company offered compensation to affected users in the form of a discount off the premium Robinhood Gold membership, which TechCrunch described as “woefully insufficient” given the value of stock trades made by app users.
Following the first outages, the company sent an email to customers noting that the app was up and promising three months of the subscription service for free in compensation. The complete text of the email message sent out is as follows:
“We’re reaching out to let you know that Robinhood is currently back up and running. We want to assure you that your funds are safe and personal information was not affected.
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.
Please reach out to us here if you were affected by this outage, so we can work with you directly to address your concerns. It may take us longer than usual to respond, but we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
As a first step, we’re giving Robinhood Gold customers credit for three months of the Gold subscription fee.
Thank you for being a Robinhood customer — we appreciate your patience and will work hard to continue earning your trust. To help answer some question you may have, we’ve added FAQs below.”