The trading platform was offline Monday when markets increased by US$1.1 trillion. It’s offering US$15 in compensation for users, as well as additional money on a case-by-case basis. Robinhood emailed users on Tuesday saying service had been restored; it then went down again briefly, but as of publication time, it appears to be back up. (TechCrunch, Business Insider)

Talking point: This is the latest in a series of setbacks for Robinhood, which was most recently valued at US$7.6 billion. In 2018, it cancelled plans to offer chequing accounts. The year after, it was fined US$1.25 million over concerns it wasn’t giving people the best prices on trades; users also found a glitch in its system that effectively gave them free money. Robinhood helped change the industry by offering zero-cost trades, something that is now widespread. But the outage comes at a difficult time for the company, which is facing pressure as massive financial institutions buy up its rivals. For example, Charles Schwab is buying TD Ameritrade and Morgan Stanley is acquiring E*Trade. Robinhood partially attributed the outage to record sign-ups on its platform, though that did little to assuage customer backlash: one group threatened a class-action lawsuit over money they claim they lost while the platform was down.