Robinhood Looks to Win Back Users Angry Over System Outage on Historic Market Day

Crypto and trading app Robinhood has begun taking action to reconcile with users affected by technical problems that sidelined them during the biggest one-day point gain in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

On March 23, Robinhood reportedly emailed affected users to apologize for the incident and demonstrate its intention to rebuild customers’ trust in the form of credits, with the dollar amount to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Will users get reimbursement?

A spokesperson for Robinhood told Cointelegraph that after reviewing customers’ emails and accounts, Robinhood indeed credited some of the affected customers. 

Specifically, Robinhood credited clients who are currently using its premium feature, Robinhood Gold, with three months of the “Gold” subscription free. The spokesperson further emphasized that not every person who has an account on the platform will receive compensation during the next few weeks on an individual basis. The firm plans to limit its credits to those who responded to the company and confirmed that they were affected by the incident.

The company declined to comment on the total number of the affected users, as well as on the users outflow from the platform following the outage.

Three crashes in two weeks

As Cointelegraph reported, on March 2, Robinhood experienced a day-long technical problem, with users being unable to complete their exchange orders or load their portfolio lists and charts.

At the time, a spokesperson for the startup told Cointelegraph that the issue resulted in outages across many of its services, making users unable to use the company’s app, website, and help center. The spokesperson noted that the problem was not caused by a failure to code for leap year.

Robinhood subsequently partially restored trading. That incident was, however, the first in a series of technical issues, which took place on March 9 and March 12. The outage of March 9 left the platform inoperable until 10:25 a.m. EDT, with services being restored at 3:30 p.m. EDT, less than 30 minutes before the markets closed. On March 12, users reported that Robinhood was down again.

Users filed federal class lawsuit against Robinhood

Following the March 2 outage, one of the Robinhood’s users filed a federal class lawsuit on behalf of himself and other traders, on March 4. The plaintiff alleged that Robinhood breached its contract by failing to “provide a functioning platform,” causing traders to be unable to transfer money while stock markets surged.

The platform’s customer agreement, however, explicitly states that it is not liable for “temporary interruptions in service due to maintenance, Website or App changes, or failures.”