Stocktrading app Ropbinhood is warning users to expect more outages as it deals with operational failures that knocked its systems offline during a stock market rally last week.
Robinhood is facing threats of legal action from angry customers following a 17-hour outage on the day the stock market gained $1.1 trillion.
A blog post attributed to Robinhood's founders says that the cause of the outage "was stress on our infrastructure—which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect—triggering a failure of our DNS system."
The firm says that multiple factors contributed to the system overload, including volatile market conditions, record volumes and high numbers of account sign-ups.
Admitting that it took "too long" to rectify the problems, the firm now says it is working to improve the resilience of its infrastructure and to reduce interdependencies.
The patch up job has already contributed to a second limited outage and there may be more on the way. The firm warns: "As our engineering team works to upgrade our infrastructure, we may experience additional brief outages, but we’re now better positioned to more quickly resolve them."