Day traders hoping to play the market using E-Trade Thursday morning found themselves scrambling for alternatives when the site suffered technical difficulties that prevented at least some users from making trades.
Users said they were unable to cover orders or execute any trades. The outage, which was ongoing as of late Thursday morning, is occurring at the same time that stocks are giving back recent gains. At 10:40 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 106 points.
A message posted to users on the site at 10:03 a.m. ET read, “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.” The company has not acknowledged the issue on social media channels, though. And the system-wide notice apparently went out long after users began complaining about the issue.
On social media, many customers soundly rejected the apology.
Https://twitter.com/RhondaAnne4/status/928637069848711168
Damn @etrade What the hell is wrong with your platform? Lagging. Won't generate orders Now error accessing account. 😡
— Make It Happen (@CrimsonTrades) November 9, 2017
@etrade what's going on with platform this morning? Rings in and then put back on hold … Pissed. Pic.twitter.com/sNskbBakn9
— Nathan Michaud (@InvestorsLive) November 9, 2017
Once again I asked @etrade a while ago to send out a platform wide message that states they are AWARE of the ISSUE and are currently fixing it to make everyone realize there is an issue. They said they would, FAIL FAIL FAIL.
— Nathan Michaud (@InvestorsLive) November 9, 2017
https://twitter.com/philschwartz/status/928639710947397638
https://twitter.com/ericace2001/status/928635902884278272
A representative from E-Trade told Coins2Day that the company is working swiftly to resolve the problem.
E-Trade ended its most recent fiscal quarter with customer assets totaling $365.3 billion. As of the end of last year, it had approximately 3.6 million brokerage accounts.