Investment Firms Suffer Website Outages -- 2nd Update
February 05 2018 - 7:42PM
Dow Jones News
By Daisy Maxey and Sarah Krouse
The websites and mobile applications of discount brokerages,
mutual-fund firms and digital advisers suffered outages and
slowdowns Monday, unnerving individual investors trying to access
their accounts during the market rout.
The trading disruptions occurred as U.S. stocks plunged toward
the end of the trading day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed
down more than 1,170 points Monday, its biggest one-day point drop
ever, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were both off around
4%.
Investors complained online of outages at Betterment LLC, a
pioneer in the automated investing world; digital adviser
Wealthfront Inc.; Charles Schwab Corp.; TD Ameritrade Holding
Corp.; Vanguard Group; and elsewhere.
One firm, T. Rowe Price Group Inc., suffered an outage late in
the day before restoring service.
A spokeswoman for the firm said it had "experienced brief
accessibility issues on some of its websites" that had been
resolved. "We apologize for any inconvenience experienced by our
clients," she said.
Alexander Sosnowski, a strategy analyst at Gap Inc. in San
Francisco who has a Vanguard account, saw the stock market was
falling fast at the end of the trading day as he was taking his
lunch break. The 25-year-old had cash in his account that he wanted
to invest in S&P 500 stocks and saw a buying opportunity.
"Since it was such a big drop...I knew it was an opportunity to
take advantage of it," Mr. Sosnowski said. After 20 minutes of
trying unsuccessfully to access his account, he called his mother
to see if she could log in. When that didn't work, he tried calling
the company to execute the trade over the phone, but the call was
dropped twice.
Many Vanguard Group customers were unable to log into their
accounts Monday afternoon. Several posted on Twitter and on
bogleheads.org, a popular online investing forum named after
company founder John C. Bogle, that they couldn't see their account
balances or trade Monday afternoon.
Some said they were met with messages that account information
was "temporarily unavailable" or that the page they requested
couldn't be found. "I can't log in," one investor wrote on
bogleheads.org of Vanguard's system, and asked whether others were
having the same issue. It appeared that many were. Another poster
wrote, "It is a bit unsettling" to not be able to login.
A spokeswoman for Vanguard said that some clients might have
experienced "sporadic difficulty" accessing their accounts at
Vanguard.com or by phone. "Full access has been restored," the
spokeswoman said.
A spokeswoman for Wealthfront said its clients were unable to
log into their accounts for a short period. She didn't specify the
length of the outage.
"At Wealthfront, stability and security are of the utmost
importance, and our team worked to resolve the issue quickly and we
continue to work tirelessly to improve upon the experience so our
clients don't experience this again," she said.
A spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade said that one application -- its
TDAmeritrade Mobile, which allows clients to access their accounts
and trade -- suffered some slowness for a few minutes Monday
afternoon. The firm wasn't aware of any problems with its systems
beyond that, she said.
TD Ameritrade received a lot of phone calls on Monday afternoon
due to the market's decline, she said. "Clients want to talk," she
said. "Like anything, it's important to remain calm."
A spokesman for Betterment said in an email that clients
experienced login issues for approximately 30 minutes on Monday
afternoon because of particularly high volume and that the issues
had been resolved. "Accounts were secure throughout, and
portfolio-management activities, like rebalancing and tax-loss
harvesting, continued," he said.
A Schwab spokeswoman said one of its trading applications had
delayed logins for some clients for a few minutes. Traders were
alerted and diverted to Schwab.com, which hadn't experienced any
issues, and the issue was resolved within minutes, she said in an
email.
Write to Daisy Maxey at daisy.maxey@wsj.com and Sarah Krouse at
sarah.krouse@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 05, 2018 19:27 ET (00:27 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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