Schwab users are unable to log in
89 points by ajoseps 11 months ago | 67 comments- gradus_ad 11 months agoCompletely unacceptable.
For those unaware TD Ameritrade was acquired by Schwab recently and in the year since the acquisition Schwab has had multiple days of outages. I was with TD for years without a single instance I can recall of being unable to access my account.
This is just absolute negligence and neglect of necessary technical investment from management. The only thing that will get their attention is people withdrawing funds and moving to better run brokerages, which is what I intend to do.
- ensignavenger 11 months agoI have been a Scwhab customer for years and have never had any issue logging in.
- abadpoli 11 months agoI’ve been a Schwab user for years, and was a TDA user as well before the merger. TDA had just as many issues like this. Don’t let your recency bias fool you.
Schwab is overall a great bank and brokerage. Fidelity’s user experience quite frankly is much worse, as is E-Trade’s. Vanguard is even worse than those. IBKR looks nice, but the hassle hasn’t been worth it to me. Schwab has been great for me so far.
- saratogacx 11 months agoI'm a bit surprised at the short term memory as well. TDA, and Think Or Swim before that all had outages on Occasion.
My experience was that my ToS desktop app was still logged in and kept an active connection, On my Android phone, the Schwab App was able to work (I only use it as a backup) while TOS (My more daily trading app) required me to wipe the local data to get logging in working again (A fix that was required last time Schwab messed up the log-in system).
Schwab has, in the last year or so, made their login much more complex to work with MFA across all apps. This probably have their log in servers doing a lot more work than they projected.
- saratogacx 11 months ago
- max_ 11 months agoWhat are the "better run" brokerages? Any examples you suggest?
- sleepingpie 11 months agoI don’t love robinhood as a company but functionally it works really well most of the time.
I think a lot of the newer banks/neobanks are pretty good both because they have less customers and therefore less stampeding herd issues and because they are a lot more oriented towards supporting fast scaling. I use Wealthfront and have enjoyed so far
- ensignavenger 11 months agoRobinhood? You mean the company that halted trading of Gamestop stock and lied about why? I don't know, maybe their app isn't "broken" but it certainly isn't reliable.
- areyousure 11 months agoToday around 9am (Eastern time), Robinhood retroactively canceled all orders filled(!) between 1:45am and 4am.
- ensignavenger 11 months ago
- _boffin_ 11 months agoPersonally, i've never had any issues w/ Fidelity.
- rabbits77 11 months agoI've used www.firstrade.com for decades now. Not a well known name, but extraordinarily reliable.
- dzhiurgis 11 months agoIBKR?
- sleepingpie 11 months ago
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- ensignavenger 11 months ago
- masterjack 11 months agoAs a long-time Schwab user, one thing I was shocked by is that the login flow silently truncates the password to eight characters. I found this since I tend to have complex suffixes I rotate around, and one day I was able to login with the wrong suffix and even with no suffix at all. This must be due to some legacy process only allowing eight characters.
- everybodyknows 11 months agoGrounds for class action litigation?
To anyone looking to test this, once login again becomes possible: Response I've gotten from Schwab website to a wrong password is merely loading of a blank page, with an endless spinner on top.
- yoctonaut 11 months agoThat's surprising and alarming. Thank you for bringing that up, though!
- everybodyknows 11 months ago
- candiddevmike 11 months agoRetail getting killed while institutions sell off. Is this something SEC will get involved with? This is like a bank stress test only for brokerages.
- botro 11 months agoIn this scenario, who are the institutions selling to?
- rsynnott 11 months agoOther institutions, retail whose brokers didn’t fail. Most activity on the markets in terms of volume would generally be, broadly, institution v institution anyway.
- rsynnott 11 months ago
- mikestew 11 months agoI’m not saying it makes it right, but retail is probably better off sitting tight for now. If anything, pros and institutions already had those sell orders ready to fire last night and would get in ahead of retail on market open, at least that’s my guess. So I don’t know what good it would have done me to be at the end of the line to sell my retail stuff.
OTOH, if you desire to go shopping for bargains, yeah, not being able to trade sucks.
- swarnie 11 months agoThey haven't the last half dozen times.
- 0goel0 11 months ago[dead]
- tootie 11 months agoIt's an interesting topic. I'm sure this is just excess server load and nothing nefarious but could the SEC mandate an SLA? Require disclosure of their DataDog dashboard?
- frankwiles 11 months agoThe SEC does mandate SLAs and have for years. They’ll pay a hefty fine for this is my understanding
- deagle50 11 months agothey don't care about fines, they are orders of magnitude less than the opportunity cost.
- deagle50 11 months ago
- frankwiles 11 months ago
- botro 11 months ago
- KyleBrandt 11 months agoMore widespread than just Schwab, multiple platforms including vanguard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41161502
- blueridge 11 months agoYeah, haven't been able to get into Vanguard all morning, looks like they're trying to load their older HTML version.
- blueridge 11 months ago
- abadpoli 11 months agoBoth Fidelity and Schwab were fine for me on devices where I was already logged in, but logging into a new device wasn’t working.
This seems like a common issue - even if backend systems can take the load, login systems all seem to have a lower TPS limit and have a lot of trouble during big surge events like this. It reminds me a lot of when a new video game releases where the issue is often the login servers being overloaded.
- dv_dt 11 months agoI can't login on a device i always use, so the failure is more complex than your sample
- abadpoli 11 months agoI’m not sure how the inability to login is “more complex”. I clearly state in my comment that logging in wasn’t working.
- dv_dt 11 months agoRevalidating session data could be a smaller surface area than validating a fresh login. But if logging in existing devices works in some cases, and doesn't in others, the failure case is more complex than just fresh logins don't work.
- dv_dt 11 months ago
- abadpoli 11 months ago
- everybodyknows 11 months agoMaybe logins are being throttled deliberately, to protect the transaction servers -- to which all institutional clients are already logged in.
West Coast retail customers are out of luck.
- dv_dt 11 months ago
- sleepingpie 11 months agoSchwabb is 100% down, can’t even get in contact with support because their phone line and chat is down
- Workaccount2 11 months agoSomehow I was able to stay logged into schwab (checked markets at 6am EST) and it's working without a hitch on the other side of login, I was able to make trades at open.
So it seems it is the login servers that are getting destroyed, which is expected, but also annoying that this happens anytime volatility spikes. You'd think they would be prepared by now. Or maybe it's "overlooked" to dampen panic selling by retail...
- jarsin 11 months agoIt's almost like nobody unique indexes the username column anymore.
- jarsin 11 months ago
- crsv 11 months agoWill probably save a lot of people money by inhibiting panic selling for losses.
- bitwidget 11 months agoOn the other hand, it's also preventing people from buying shares and capitalizing on the downturn.
- bitwidget 11 months ago
- jebby 11 months agoI was planning on opening accounts with Schwab, but after I signed up and went through the login process, I very quickly closed the account and went elsewhere. It was among the worst user experiences I can recall. Everything about it screamed legacy and immutable. I had the same feeling about LastPass a few years ago. Always go with the gut!
- neilv 11 months agoWe could say that people not able to access their accounts right now means less panic-selling by retirement account owners, so fewer people locking in their losses.
But that doesn't make it right.
People not being able to sell/buy when they really want to (and should be able to) also lends itself to suspicions of retail/retirement investors being sheep to be shorn by professional investors, and the mad scramble of a market correction is when there's less pretense otherwise.
- compumike 11 months agoDoes anyone on the inside know, when people talk about login services being down, what’s the actual technical bottleneck?
I’d hope we’re not talking about them simply not having enough CPU to bcrypt_compare() everyone’s passwords as they try to log in…
In-house service-wide rate limits that are too low?
Two-factor auth steps? (Third party providers may be rate limiting?)
Anti-fraud things? GeoIP lookups? Etc
Writing out logs of logins? Some login audit DB?
(Or is it not actually some login-specific service that is down?)
- shermantanktop 11 months ago“Login” is such a misnomer. It sounds like a password check (==read) but includes write activities of various kinds and complex can’t-skip logic.
It’s the step where the system first sees the user and must establish identity, of course. But it’s also an attractive place for system designers to frontload complex logic that result in cache-priming or context-priming which the rest of the system depends upon. And then there’s DDOS, device status, account status, anti-fraud, throttles, etc.
- shermantanktop 11 months ago
- neilv 11 months ago"Financial Sites Including Schwab, Fidelity, And Vanguard Experience Outages As Stocks Decline"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/08/05/financial...
Downdetector also says E-trade high reports.
If it's true that all four had outages, that's going to need some explaining.
But I'm also keeping in mind that the source of the data is Downdetector user reports, presumably some percentage of which are user's own computer/networking problems or forgotten passwords, and presumably there will be a much higher number of people who rarely log in trying to do so, right after news that looks like possible imminent market crash.
- mikestew 11 months agoIt’s not the login that’s the problem. On two accounts, I could login to Fidelity just fine. Displaying balances and positions threw an error, however.
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- mikestew 11 months ago
- ajoseps 11 months agoseems like fidelity is also affected: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/online-trading-plat...
- djeastm 11 months agoThere goes thinking we had any sort of resiliency in the retail stock market...
I really wonder how all of the major brokers could be having an issue. Is it just one of those "we haven't ever had a real market crash since we started this website in 2015, so let's not do a load test" kind of thing?
- TacticalCoder 11 months agoFWIW Interactive Brokers is working fine (so far) but, geez, is it a rock'n'roll day!
- mikkom 11 months agoYes tws is printing numbers like crazy. Happy to be with solid broker :-D
- ricketyricky 11 months ago[dead]
- ricketyricky 11 months ago
- mikkom 11 months ago
- jwcrux 11 months agoVanguard is also affected for me.
- wbshaw 11 months agoYesterday, I was able to successfully log in before the market opened without issues. My session timed out and it took me four tries to get logged in. I was able to finally get a confirmation code and complete the login process after about 10 minutes. This was mid-morning.
This is the third time in 3 weeks I've had login issues. The first two were massively delayed 2fa keys to my phone. They directly correlated to Azure issues and down time. I wouldn't be surprised if this was somehow related to yet another outage with one of their infrastructure providers.
- nemo44x 11 months agoThere's a good reason you want to avoid holding significant margin over the weekend, or even over night. Anyways, there will be plenty of good deals going on sale this week. The market is granting opportunity this week. If you're not on margin and looking to be fast then just ignore and keep adding to your investment accounts as you have been.
- codegeek 11 months agoVanguard is down as well. What a racket
- nimbius 11 months agoI wonder if this has anything to do with the massive global sell-off?
- daemonologist 11 months agoIt absolutely does - Fidelity, Vanguard, eTrade, and others are also having issues to some degree.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5ykkryglp3t?post=asset%3Ad625...
- daemonologist 11 months ago
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- everybodyknows 11 months agoBloomberg Surveillance daily before-opening podcast: None this morning, not on Apple mobile.
- jarsin 11 months agoThey learned this from Coinbase.
- MangoCoffee 11 months agoThe current market is pretty red... I'm no conspiracy theorist, but isn't it suspicious that two major brokers (Schwab and Vanguard) are down?
- TacticalCoder 11 months agoSomeone in this thread reported Fidelity being down too. This is a bit suspicious indeed.
- abadpoli 11 months agoIt’s the largest trading volume day in years and everyone that isn’t living under a rock is trying to log into their banks to check their portfolio. The banks can’t handle the surge logging in.
It’s not that suspicious. Not everything is a conspiracy.
- abadpoli 11 months ago
- TacticalCoder 11 months ago
- manvillej 11 months agomobile apps seem to be working just fine
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- 0goel0 11 months ago[dead]
- ricketyricky 11 months ago[dead]
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- yieldcrv 11 months agoAmusing that Robinhood is working
I wonder if pre-emptively moving to a 24 hour trading market has helped reduce load on Robinhood
- creaghpatr 11 months agoExcept Robinhood halted 24 hr trading last night https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/robinhood-h...
- uncivilized 11 months agoThat has nothing to do with Robinhood and everything to do with BOATS, their off exchange provider.
- yieldcrv 11 months agoAh, probably wise with the expected massive divergence in price discovery. Well, nothing explained fully, thanks
- uncivilized 11 months ago
- bob1029 11 months ago> I wonder if pre-emptively moving to a 24 hour trading market has helped reduce load on Robinhood
Not directly, but expanding the product scope may have placed additional selection pressure on engineering choices such that boring and stable options became more likely over time.
- qclibre22 11 months agohttps://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HOOD/
Robinhood down 15% this morning.
- yieldcrv 11 months agoThat’s a non sequitur
- yieldcrv 11 months ago
- creaghpatr 11 months ago