What Caused Robinhood’s Technical Issues?

Robinhood has hit the headlines, and not for a good reason, with experiencing a system-wide outage, leaving many users unable to access their accounts. So what caused the outage?
The technical issues started on Monday, which was one of the busiest trading days of the year, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoying the single biggest point-gain since 2009.

As , there were a number of complaints from customers, namely from those who could not get into their accounts online. Complaints also included either slowness or lack of access to certain features, as well as problems trading some asset classes on the no-fee app. Others said they could not see their account balances.
Does Robinhood have a Leap Day bug?
There appear to be a few theories as to what caused the system outage, such as high trading volumes putting too much pressure on the system. Another theory to have surfaced is a Leap Day bug.

Hey did someone forget to add isleap() to your python module? Imagine losing thousands of dollars because someone didn’t code for the leap year. It’s looking for 3/03 data and throwing errors out the ass.

— Jtech63 (@jtech63)

 
An also shows that a similar glitch occurred on the 2nd of March, 2016, which was also after a Leap Day, which does give credence to the theory.

However, although Robinhood has denied that a 29th error was at fault, the company has yet to provide a reason for what has caused the outage. Regardless of the cause, the technical issues could cost its customers.
According to TechCrunch, a spokesperson wrote in an email on Monday: “We started experiencing downtime issues across our platform this morning at market open. We don’t have an estimate when the issue will be resolved but all of us at Robinhood are working as hard as we can to resume service.”
What a bug-ger
For some, this week’s issue might feel a bit like déjà vu, as this is not the first bug to cause problems for the stock trading app. Towards the end of last year, a allowed certain customers to acquire an ‘infinite leverage’ while trading stocks on its millennial-targeting platform.
Finance Magnates has reached out to Robinhood for further details on what caused the technical glitch, however, as of the time of publishing we have not yet received a response.