Robinhood has yet to address the apparent platform-wide outage of its trading services across the mobile app and website.
Summary
- Thousands of Robinhood users reported being unable to do trades
- Traders are complaining about being unable to close positions, which can result in losses
- Scammers are already trying to exploit the situation with phishing messages
Robinhood is experiencing a major, platform-wide outage. On Monday, Oct. 6, tens of thousands of Robinhood traders were apparently unable to perform trades on Robinhood apps. Many took to social media to complain. Shares of Robinhood were lower by around 1% after opening for trading in the green.
Users were unable to access their accounts, trade, or check balances on the platform. Moreover, according to an online platform, Downdetector, more than 11,000 users reported an issue with Robinhood.
Traders immediately shared their frustration, especially as the outage happened at market open. What is more, some traders reported concerns over being unable to close their positions, with at least some traders reporting direct losses.
So far, it’s unclear what caused the outage. However, the outage coincided with similar issues on platforms like GuruFocus. For this reason, some traders speculated that the cause may be with some of the APIs that Robinhood is using. This explanation is consistent with the fact that users could access the platform, but could not see data or perform trades.
Scammers are already exploiting the Robinhood outage
Other users reported that scammers are already jumping on the opportunity. Users reported receiving phishing messages from unknown numbers, warning them of a supposed risk of theft. These scams attempt to obtain users’ credentials by redirecting them to fake websites, which can result in the total loss of their balances.
Worse yet, technical issues with Robinhood might make social-engineering scams more likely to succeed. As traders scramble to make sense of what is going on, some may fall into the scammers’ trap.
