As the stock markets approached closing time today, online brokerage firm ETrade started unraveling the details behind a technical glitch that left most of its customers without the capability to trade for much of the day.
The company blamed the problems, which started at 10:15 a.m. EST and continued for several hours, on a malfunction in a piece of software that was installed Tuesday night. The company continues to investigate the technical difficulties and is beginning to patch relations with an angry customer base.
An official company statement released at 3:30 p.m. EST, read acknowledged, "ETrade customers were unable to enter orders through the trading page of the ETrade Web site.
"Trading through the company's interactive voice-recognition system also was affected for approximately 50 minutes. Approximately 5 percent of our customers may still be having problems accessing trading functionality through the Web site."
On the Web, discussions about the problems took place on popular day-trading sites. In one real-time chat room at Daytraders, many traders expressed frustration and shared developing information. The discussion started at approximately 10 a.m. EST and continued until about noon, when some users reported trading services were back online. Spotty outages were reported for the remainder of the day.
Wired News verified the service failures using a test account. After entering ETrade's trading screen, the user received a message that said, "The trading feature is unavailable at this time" or "This service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again."
ETrade has experienced failures before, but none has been as widespread and lasted as long as today's, which meant that thousands of customers could not execute stock trades. Many customers were irate, and some canceled service.
"I'm trusting these guys with thousands of dollars of my money, and they can't provide me consistent access to it," said one ETrade customer, who asked to remain unnamed because he feared retribution from ETrade officials as he attempted to transfer money to another service.
"Hours, sometimes days, go by with me unable to put money into a suddenly hot stock, pull out of one that's tanking, or try to get in on an IPO. I'm disgusted with this company."
The service appeared to come back online for brief periods of time in the afternoon, but outages continued. As of 3:30 p.m. EST, Wired News still encountered service problems with the test account.
ETrade set up a special e-mail address for customer-service issues specifically related to today's problems.
