Major outages at Robinhood and Schwab were spurred by stock splits for Tesla and Apple, report says
- The recent stock splits of Apple and Tesla caused major outages at brokerage firms like Robinhood and Charles Schwab on Monday, according to Bloomberg.
- The stock splits prompted a surged in trading volumes that led to thousands of retail investors being unable to use their brokerage accounts.
- Other popular brokerage firms experienced service disruptions, including TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and Vanguard.
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Several brokerage firms popular with retail investors experienced service disruptions on Monday due to the recent stock splits of Apple and Tesla, according to Bloomberg.
Surging trading volumes caused by the stock splits "contributed to problems" at Robinhood and Charles Schwab on Monday, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The disruptions also spread to brokerage firms like TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and Vanguard.
Most of the trading issues were solved that day.
Apple recently completed a 4-for-1 stock split, while Tesla completed a 5-for-1 stock split, both of which went into effect on Monday.
For Robinhood, the service disruptions included a technical problem that sparked delays to order status updates for customers. It did not face a system-wide outage, according to Bloomberg.
This isn't Robinhood's first rodeo dealing with glitches and outages. Retail traders were outraged back in March when its app was unusable for a period of nearly two days amid a volatile market sell-off.
For Schwab, a recent change to the storage system it uses to display stock quotes clashed with the heightened trading volumes surrounding Apple and Tesla's split, resulting in an error.
Meanwhile, TD Ameritrade said issues with its app and website on Monday were "completely unrelated" to the stock splits, Bloomberg said.