Following a series of platform outages during historic price action earlier this month, Robinhood, a popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app, now faces another class action complaint.
The lawsuit, filed March 25, was brought by customer Bruce Queen, on behalf of “all Robinhood customers within the United States who were not able to execute trades on securities or change limit orders during the Outages and incurred financial losses.”
Missing the biggest gain in Dow history
As Cointelegraph reported, on March 2, the Robinhood suffered technical problems for the entire day, meaning customers were unable to trade the securities in their accounts for a period of over sixteen hours.
This coincided with the then-biggest one-day point gain in the Dow Jones stock market index history.
Queen alleges that he had bought put contracts through the platform on Feb. 28, and submitted a sell order for these on March 2. However, he was unable to access the sell order throughout the day and the order was canceled by Robinhood on the morning of March 3. Queen was then forced to sell his contracts at a lower price on March 3.
Technical trouble not over for Robinhood
While Queen managed to sell his contracts on March 3, Robinhood’s technical problems were far from over. The platform went offline again for around three hours that day, reportedly due to an unprecedented load caused by a record volume of trades.
A week later on March 9 the platform suffered another outage, with customers unable to buy or sell securities on the public market. This third outage coincided with a major crash across stock markets, with the Dow losing 2,000 points and the Nasdaq Composite index falling 7.3%.
Yet more issues with the platform were reported on March 12.
Queen is not claiming losses on behalf of himself during these subsequent outages, but they are included on behalf of class-action participants who have.
Trying to win back community trust
Following the repeated outages there was a heated reaction from service users who had lost out. The platform has attempted to win back the trust of affected users in the form of credits, with the exact dollar amount being decided on a case-to-case basis.
However, it seems that this has failed to pacify all of the disgruntled customers, who are now demanding a jury trial in the class-action suit.
Indeed, Robinhood is facing another class-action lawsuit related to the platform outages in a United States federal court in Florida.
