Down goes Robinhood

The market rallied today and S&P was up almost 5%. The dominating news was Robinhood being down starting from 3 minutes after opening bell. As of 8:46pm PST as I write this, Robinhood is still down and experiencing outages although I was able to open the app for the first time today.

Apps and websites crash all the time. We’ve experienced outages on nearly everyone of our favorite apps at a point in time. However, given the nature of Robinhood’s business, this is a major issue. Robinhood’s 6 million users were not able to execute trades or even review their account. A large number of users undoubtedly could make the argument that they lost money.

As someone in fintech, I have a lot of sympathy for Robinhood. It’s hard to be perfect all the time and well, shit happens unexpectedly no matter how good you are and how much you prepare.

I am in no means giving Robinhood a pass on this. I struggled with the thought of not being able to see my account or make a trade today. They have without a doubt lost the trust of a lot of users.

With that said, there is a human aspect to all this. I know a lot of people at Robinhood and they are an extremely talented bunch but like all of us, human. I know they are working their tails off to get this back up and running and will hopefully learn from this as they continue to grow and disrupt the industry.

I’ll be rooting for them.