Robinhood's cofounders blame 'stress to its infrastructure' from an 'unprecedented load' for massive outages during huge market gyrations

robinhood cofounders

Robinhood cofounders and co-CEOs Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev wrote a post on the startup's blog addressing recent outages.
The post cited "stress to its infrastructure" from an "unprecedented load."
The cofounders said the $7.6 billion startup is investing in adding more redundancies to its infrastructure.
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Robinhood's cofounders posted a note on Tuesday night to the popular trading app's blog blaming recent system-wide outages on "stress to its infrastructure" from an "unprecedented load."

In a note written by cofounders and co-CEOs Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, the duo said the response to restoring service to the trading app, which has over 10 million user accounts, took "too long."

"We now understand the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure -- which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a "thundering herd" effect -- triggering a failure of our DNS system," the note said. "Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups."

The post went on to say that Robinhood is working to improve the resiliency of its infrastructure to meet the heightened load it has been experiencing. The startup, valued at $7.6 billion, is currently working to reduce interdependencies in its infrastructure in addition to investing in more redundancies.

Robinhood users lashed out online at the trading app, which is popular amongst millennials, for the system-wide outage that started Monday and bled into Tuesday morning. A twitter account named Robinhood Class Action was created Monday and had over 6,300 followers as of Tuesday night.

"We take our responsibility to you and your money seriously. We recognize that many of you have questions, and we are working to respond to them as quickly as possible," the post read. "Many of you depend on Robinhood for your investments, and we're personally committed to doing all we can to operate a stable service that's available when you need it the most."

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