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Robinhood Had One Job To Do
But it’s probably not the job you think
This past Monday morning, as the world braced for the reopening of stock exchanges in the wake of Friday’s partial meltdown, the highly popular mobile investing startup Robinhood went offline.
The official statement from the company said that the outage was caused by “instability in a part of our infrastructure that allows our systems to communicate with each other,” which, rather than calming the panic and frustration felt by users who were missing out on the largest daily point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s history, only made things worse, and led to speculation and calls for class-action suits against the company for the failure of its app.
The “infrastructure” issue was resolved late Tuesday night, and the app was back up and running on Wednesday, but the damage was done: The more than 10 million active users of the app had missed out on the opportunity to make trades during the greatest period of volatility since 2009.
The spectacular implosion of a startup valued at over $7 Billion raises all kinds of questions about its underlying commitment to its more than 10 million customers.
Apps fail, software breaks, servers go offline. These things happen routinely in the modern internet-enabled world we live in. So…
