Schwab, Fidelity, other online brokerages face disruption on frenetic trading day

ONLINE services at brokerages Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments faced an outage on Monday (Aug 5), frustrating investors looking to trade on a day when many dumped anything risky from stocks to crypto on fears of a US recession.

Some users were having problems logging into their accounts, the trading apps confirmed, without elaborating.

Wall Street’s main indexes plunged on Monday as weak economic data, drab second-quarter earnings from technology majors, and geopolitical tensions revived concerns about a recession and dampened hopes of a soft landing.

Bouts of extreme market volatility can sometimes trigger such technical problems, which also raise questions about the capacity of brokerages to handle high volumes.

Fidelity later said it had resolved the issue.

Schwab was down for more than 3,400 users while outage reports on Fidelity peaked at over 3,500, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

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Vanguard also saw nearly 2,500 outage reports, the website showed. The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

Earlier in the day, Robinhood Markets, the platform of choice for several retail investors, said it had resumed overnight trading after a pause. The company lets users trade select stocks and exchange-traded funds 24 hours. REUTERS