On Monday of this week, two of the NYSE’s most popular stocks, Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc., split. The consequential influx of trading activity when markets opened caused technical difficulties at Robinhood Markets and Charles Schwab Corp., leaving many investors unable to access their brokerage accounts.
Robinhood was experiencing delays on status updates related to customer orders of Apple and Tesla shares. Schwab had made changes to its storage systems that display price quotes which led to errors due to the high volume of Tesla and Apple shares being traded, according to BNN Bloomberg. Neither issue was system-wide, but did cause problems for a significant number of users.
Schwab representative Mayura Hooper commented, “We have handled far greater volumes than we experienced on Monday as demonstrated by our site performance, which is at over 99.9 per cent for the year.”
Robinhood said it suffered a technical problem that delayed customer order status updates, but there was no system-wide outage. The Apple and Tesla stock split, which caused heavy traffic, did not make it easier to resume normal operations, claim one source familiar with the matter, reports BNN Bloomberg.
While most of the issues were worked out by noon on Monday, the outages still sent a noticeable ripple through Wall Street. Excitement among investors about these two stocks, however, seems to be keeping the market afloat.
Vanguard representatives claimed that their system did not experience any glitches during the surge, while Fidelity and TD Ameritrade have yet to comment on the situation.
