Photographer: Gabby Jones / Bloomberg
Photographer: Gabby Jones / Bloomberg
The crush of retail trading on Wednesday left online brokers reeling, with several sites reporting outages and failures and one even limiting trades on major stocks.
Charles Schwab Corp. was among those affected by service interruptions, since traders were paralyzed by large fluctuations in the shares of strongly sold shares, such as GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Robinhood Markets, Morgan Stanley’s E * Trade and Fidelity were also affected, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks user complaints.
Schwab’s TD Ameritrade has taken the rare step of limiting some transactions in GameStop, AMC and others. The company said the high volume may have restricted access to its mobile application and asked customers to use its other platforms.
“We made these decisions out of caution in an unprecedented environment market conditions and other factors, ”TD Ameritrade spokeswoman Margaret Farrell said by email.
Robinhood said he was able to solve problems with his web application, while Schwab said some customers were struggling with online commerce because of a technical problem.
Read more: GameStop Rally reaches new extremes with the surrender of short sellers
Schwab’s customers were facing problems amid “intense market negotiations,” spokeswoman Mayura Hooper said in an email.
Spokesmen for Schwab and Fidelity said the companies solved the problems with their platforms. AE * Trade declined to comment.
(Updates with Schwab solving problems in the last paragraph.)