The company never said their downtime was related to the leap year afaik, that was some random twitter thread looking at requests on their browser that had datestamps from the future (which could have other explanations). Unless they're rolling their own date library (which is very unlikely), the code should be using the system time of whatever computer the software is running on, meaning it would be extremely unlikely that the leap year caused a bug.

You are correct in that it's more likely their system just can't scale.

I did just that early last year when I realized that they simply don’t have the infrastructure, support personnel or sense of urgency I needed from a broker to handle my money. This is pre-free trades — I decided that I rather pay a fee than roll the dice on when they’ll clear trades and bank transfers (in one instance an ACH took 2-weeks, with canned messages from support).

Something tells me Robinhood users will abandon stocks altogether after this week.

Why trade stocks when you can trade OPTIONS?

I never understood the appeal of using a telephone to trade one's life savings anyway.

I don't see how it's worse to do it on a phone than your laptop, or over the phone with a broker via a voice call?

Most folks I know who use RH just use it as a fun little side gamble/game. Small-ish amounts of money, something they could afford to lose, with the rest in more stable funds or investments.

I agree, both that that's my experience and that it's the right way to use RH. But then that means this isn't exactly an existential crisis; if you can't run your side gamble during some periods of high market volatility, does it really matter?

On one hand, now is a fun/important time to be messing with your side gamble. It'd be like if a betting site went down the day of the Super Bowl. If you're just using RH to gamble and day-trade, periods of high volatility are some of the most fun times to be actively trading!

On the other hand, I don't really care. I'll be fine. Most of the folks I know who use RH are just joking about it being down. It's annoying, but no one's broken up about it. A lot of the folks casting their anger at RH seem to be folks who already dislike it and probably don't use it?

Professional or large-scaled investors with large sums invested probably aren't using RH for a lot of reasons even before you get to the downtime issues.

Maybe I'm an old grumpy man, but I just prefer a real computer for serious work.

It probably works fine, but I am never as confident on a touch screen. I even prefer to order pizza on a desktop.

Personally, I never understood the appeal of holding corporate fiat paper however it was transacted.

Because that can turn into federal fiat money used to buy food, save for retirement or go on vacation.

Yeah, but that’s just because you have trouble grasping immaterial concepts, and also object permanence.

Surprisingly, last week's outages didn't drive their customers away. They still have enough demand to crash their systems. Inertia is powerful.

It takes a few days to transfer money from your Robinhood account to your bank account.

Are there RH competitors? Same level of easy tech, free trading, etc?

Almost all discount brokerages now offer commission free trades

But not for options trading, which is the main allure.

Its only like 60 cents per contract on think or swim. If that makes or breaks you, pull your $7 out of the market and stop trading.

Vanguard now has free trades. Their UI isn't as slick as RH's, but AFAIK their back end is battle tested and has a lower liklihood of going down.