Robinhood is back up and will offer premium users a measly $15 to compensate for downtime

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Robinhood was down for almost two days this week, and now the company wants to reimburse its Robinhood Gold users a measly $15 for the hiccup, according to TechCrunch.

The company says this move is a “first step” and will evaluate each user’s situation on a case-by-case basis to see if any additional money is owed.

“When it comes to your money, issues like this are not acceptable. We realize we let you down, and our team is committed to improving your experience,” Robinhood wrote in an email to users on Tuesday.

Robinhood’s outage couldn’t come at a worse time. As we mentioned yesterday, the outage occurred at a time when the market was fluctuating, and for those of us that enjoy dabbling in the market, it meant a lot of us missed out on some of those sweet gains from the past 48 hours.

So, what caused the outage?

There’s a lot of speculation surrounding a coding error where developers never factored in a leap year into the app’s code. Apparently, this wasn’t the case. Robinhood recently described what happened in a recent blog post:

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.

So apparently, Robinhood needs to boost its infrastructure. They practically said this could possibly happen again. The issue could have been fixed quicker had it been a simple coding error, but this seems to be something entirely different. Hopefully, this isn’t a common occurrence for the company.

Were you affected by Robinhood’s downtime? Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.