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An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

blog.robinhood.com

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Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#31

Post by idnefju »

triceratops wrote: post #11
dickjocke wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robinhood isn't a bitcoin company. That's just a feature they have. Its main product offering is the commision free trading--and their presence pushed a lot of big players to adopt the same offering. The wallstreetbets gang is silly and all, but I think they have really democratized stock trading, and made the whole idea seem much more accesible. I think they founders are former finance guys. I hope this doesn't soun…

> I think they have really democratized stock trading I would think Vanguard did that already. Most people should be trading ETFs, not individual stocks.

I believe you still need a broker for ETFs, which usually carry brokerage fees.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#32

Post by ra1n85 »

ajsharp wrote: post #24
tbrock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to us at Hustle years ago. Basically if you run on AWS there’s a DNS server provided inside each VPC that usually works fine but which has no observable load metrics etc... so you don’t really know you are slamming it and are about to have a problem unless you audit your entire codebase. Why? Well that tiny DNS server has certain capacity constraints and if you don’t cache DNS lookups by using a http/ht…

Wait, what?? There's an invisible DNS server running inside your VPC? I get what you're saying wrt cached DNS lookups but this seems wild.

It's a DNS resolver that runs on the hypervisor hosting every instance.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#33

Post by SkyPuncher »

wbl wrote: post #17
joobus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we will get a postmortem. Their lawyers will kill it because it will be an admission of guilt and open them up to even more legal liability.

The SEC did one for Knight Capital.

Being down for a trading day is not the same as actively selling $440 million in assets.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#34

Post by jennyyang »

I know quite a few people that were personally affected by this and lost money due to the two outages and they are all pulling their money from Robinhood. The fact that they can't offer any compensation might be a big problem for them, since they already have zero trading fees, which is what most brokerages offer as compensation.

Personally it doesn't pass the smell test for me. The load was much higher the previous week and load problems go away once the load disappears. They probably had a lot less load the rest of the day, so the fact they were down the entire day suggests it was something else. I would need a fully transparent post mortem before I believed anything they said.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#35

Post by [deleted] »

tbrock wrote: post #7
mjs33 wrote: post #3

Their DNS system failed? How?! Unless DNS stands for “Do Not Sell”

This happened to us at Hustle years ago. Basically if you run on AWS there’s a DNS server provided inside each VPC that usually works fine but which has no observable load metrics etc... so you don’t really know you are slamming it and are about to have a problem unless you audit your entire codebase. Why? Well that tiny DNS server has certain capacity constraints and if you don’t cache DNS lookups by using a http/ht…

[deleted]

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#36

Post by tempsy »

Sad that there isn’t an actual apology anywhere to be found in the letter at all.

And now with the fed rate cut the interest on cash is only 1.3%, with more cuts expected later in the year, which was the last big differentiator. I don’t see how they don’t see massive net withdrawals going forward.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#38

Post by titanomachy »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #28
0xy wrote: post #8

Still silence on the traders who lost tens of thousands of dollars? Are they going to be compensating or not? This blog post doesn't appear to say anything. It's not an apology, it's not an explanation, it doesn't say what they're going to do in response. This is after the incident in which there was no status updates or support availability for multiple hours of time. Why can't they commit to updates every hour or e…

I'm having a really hard time understanding this argument. Unless I have an SLA with a provider outlining penalties, they don't owe me anything if they go down. How is this any different?

You could view it as a business decision. Will they lose reputation and customers if they don't compensate for the outage? Do they expect that the long-term cost of that loss would be more than the one-time hit of paying out now?

They may not have a legal/contractual obligation here, but that doesn't mean that treating their customers poorly is without consequence.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#39

Post by neom »

dilly_li wrote: post #20

Start from the email notification. They have been asking themselves the easy questions. Just look at the top questions in their email: * Are the funds in my account safe? Yes, your funds are safe. * Was my personal information affected? No, your personal information was not affected. * Can I use my Robinhood debit card? Yes. If you have a debit card, you should have been—and should still be able to—use your card, but…

I had to wait on hold for well over an hour to get through to the HSBC trading desk, HSBC isn't going to compensate me.

Re: An Update from Robinhood’s Founders

#40

Post by jcheng »

tbrock wrote: post #7
mjs33 wrote: post #3

Their DNS system failed? How?! Unless DNS stands for “Do Not Sell”

This happened to us at Hustle years ago. Basically if you run on AWS there’s a DNS server provided inside each VPC that usually works fine but which has no observable load metrics etc... so you don’t really know you are slamming it and are about to have a problem unless you audit your entire codebase. Why? Well that tiny DNS server has certain capacity constraints and if you don’t cache DNS lookups by using a http/ht…

I read this and thought, “surely there’s an OS-level DNS cache?”

Apparently not on Linux! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11020027/dns-caching-in-...

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