The coronavirus took Robinhood offline at a very bad time

Hi all, Julie here. Unless you were vacationing on a remote island last week, you probably heard that stocks got crushed. In fact, it was the worst week for the S&P since 2008. So it’s safe to say that on Monday, traders were anxious. A lot of people probably went into their brokerage accounts ready to make a trade or two. But for Robinhood Markets Inc. customers, that wasn’t an option.

Right around the time that the market opened, Robinhood’s site went down. All trades—stocks, options, Bitcoin and otherwise—were out of commission. The outage lasted the entire New York trading day.