Investment Firms Suffer Website Outages -- 2nd Update

By Daisy Maxey and Sarah Krouse 

The websites and mobile applications of discount brokerages, mutual-fund firms and digital advisers suffered outages and slowdowns Monday, unnerving individual investors trying to access their accounts during the market rout.

The trading disruptions occurred as U.S. stocks plunged toward the end of the trading day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down more than 1,170 points Monday, its biggest one-day point drop ever, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were both off around 4%.

Investors complained online of outages at Betterment LLC, a pioneer in the automated investing world; digital adviser Wealthfront Inc.; Charles Schwab Corp.; TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.; Vanguard Group; and elsewhere.

One firm, T. Rowe Price Group Inc., suffered an outage late in the day before restoring service.

A spokeswoman for the firm said it had "experienced brief accessibility issues on some of its websites" that had been resolved. "We apologize for any inconvenience experienced by our clients," she said.

Alexander Sosnowski, a strategy analyst at Gap Inc. in San Francisco who has a Vanguard account, saw the stock market was falling fast at the end of the trading day as he was taking his lunch break. The 25-year-old had cash in his account that he wanted to invest in S&P 500 stocks and saw a buying opportunity.

"Since it was such a big drop...I knew it was an opportunity to take advantage of it," Mr. Sosnowski said. After 20 minutes of trying unsuccessfully to access his account, he called his mother to see if she could log in. When that didn't work, he tried calling the company to execute the trade over the phone, but the call was dropped twice.

Many Vanguard Group customers were unable to log into their accounts Monday afternoon. Several posted on Twitter and on bogleheads.org, a popular online investing forum named after company founder John C. Bogle, that they couldn't see their account balances or trade Monday afternoon.

Some said they were met with messages that account information was "temporarily unavailable" or that the page they requested couldn't be found. "I can't log in," one investor wrote on bogleheads.org of Vanguard's system, and asked whether others were having the same issue. It appeared that many were. Another poster wrote, "It is a bit unsettling" to not be able to login.

A spokeswoman for Vanguard said that some clients might have experienced "sporadic difficulty" accessing their accounts at Vanguard.com or by phone. "Full access has been restored," the spokeswoman said.

A spokeswoman for Wealthfront said its clients were unable to log into their accounts for a short period. She didn't specify the length of the outage.

"At Wealthfront, stability and security are of the utmost importance, and our team worked to resolve the issue quickly and we continue to work tirelessly to improve upon the experience so our clients don't experience this again," she said.

A spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade said that one application -- its TDAmeritrade Mobile, which allows clients to access their accounts and trade -- suffered some slowness for a few minutes Monday afternoon. The firm wasn't aware of any problems with its systems beyond that, she said.

TD Ameritrade received a lot of phone calls on Monday afternoon due to the market's decline, she said. "Clients want to talk," she said. "Like anything, it's important to remain calm."

A spokesman for Betterment said in an email that clients experienced login issues for approximately 30 minutes on Monday afternoon because of particularly high volume and that the issues had been resolved. "Accounts were secure throughout, and portfolio-management activities, like rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, continued," he said.

A Schwab spokeswoman said one of its trading applications had delayed logins for some clients for a few minutes. Traders were alerted and diverted to Schwab.com, which hadn't experienced any issues, and the issue was resolved within minutes, she said in an email.

Write to Daisy Maxey at [e-mail] and Sarah Krouse at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 05, 2018 19:27 ET (00:27 GMT)

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