Schwab users are unable to log in

Completely unacceptable.<p>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.<p>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.

As 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.

Retail getting killed while institutions sell off. Is this something SEC will get involved with? This is like a bank stress test only for brokerages.

More widespread than just Schwab, multiple platforms including vanguard <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41161502">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41161502</a>

Both Fidelity and Schwab were fine for me on devices where I was already logged in, but logging into a new device wasn’t working.<p>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.

Schwabb is 100% down, can’t even get in contact with support because their phone line and chat is down

Somehow I was able to stay logged into schwab (checked markets at 6am EST) and it&#x27;s working without a hitch on the other side of login, I was able to make trades at open.<p>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&#x27;d think they would be prepared by now. Or maybe it&#x27;s &quot;overlooked&quot; to dampen panic selling by retail...

Will probably save a lot of people money by inhibiting panic selling for losses.

I 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!

We 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.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t make it right.<p>People not being able to sell&#x2F;buy when they really want to (and should be able to) also lends itself to suspicions of retail&#x2F;retirement investors being sheep to be shorn by professional investors, and the mad scramble of a market correction is when there&#x27;s less pretense otherwise.

Does anyone on the inside know, when people talk about login services being down, what’s the actual technical bottleneck?<p>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…<p>In-house service-wide rate limits that are too low?<p>Two-factor auth steps? (Third party providers may be rate limiting?)<p>Anti-fraud things? GeoIP lookups? Etc<p>Writing out logs of logins? Some login audit DB?<p>(Or is it not actually some login-specific service that is down?)

&quot;Financial Sites Including Schwab, Fidelity, And Vanguard Experience Outages As Stocks Decline&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;tylerroush&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;financial-sites-including-schwab-fidelity-and-vanguard-experience-outages-as-stocks-decline&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;tylerroush&#x2F;2024&#x2F;08&#x2F;05&#x2F;financial...</a><p>Downdetector also says E-trade high reports.<p>If it&#x27;s true that all four had outages, that&#x27;s going to need some explaining.<p>But I&#x27;m also keeping in mind that the source of the data is Downdetector user reports, presumably some percentage of which are user&#x27;s own computer&#x2F;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.

seems like fidelity is also affected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;finance&#x2F;online-trading-platforms-down-thousands-users-downdetector-shows-2024-08-05&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;finance&#x2F;online-trading-plat...</a>

There goes thinking we had any sort of resiliency in the retail stock market...<p>I really wonder how all of the major brokers could be having an issue. Is it just one of those &quot;we haven&#x27;t ever had a real market crash since we started this website in 2015, so let&#x27;s not do a load test&quot; kind of thing?

FWIW Interactive Brokers is working fine (so far) but, geez, is it a rock&#x27;n&#x27;roll day!

Vanguard is also affected for me.

Yesterday, 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.<p>This is the third time in 3 weeks I&#x27;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&#x27;t be surprised if this was somehow related to yet another outage with one of their infrastructure providers.

There&#x27;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&#x27;re not on margin and looking to be fast then just ignore and keep adding to your investment accounts as you have been.

Vanguard is down as well. What a racket

I wonder if this has anything to do with the massive global sell-off?

Bloomberg Surveillance daily before-opening podcast: None this morning, not on Apple mobile.

They learned this from Coinbase.

The current market is pretty red... I&#x27;m no conspiracy theorist, but isn&#x27;t it suspicious that two major brokers (Schwab and Vanguard) are down?

mobile apps seem to be working just fine

Amusing that Robinhood is working<p>I wonder if pre-emptively moving to a 24 hour trading market has helped reduce load on Robinhood