NEW YORK CITY (TND) — Overnight stock trading service Blue Ocean ATS on Tuesday said an outage which temporarily halted trading on the popular investment platform Robinhood was not related to efforts to quell an anxious stock market.
24-hour trading was temporarily halted on Robinhood, a Blue Ocean client, early Monday morning. The S&P 500 on that day dropped 4% in early trading followed by the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipping 1,197 points. Japan’s Nikkei 225 had taken a similar plunge of 12.4%.
Robinhood users received a notice informing them the 24-hour market was “unavailable.” A source familiar with the matter told The National Desk (TND) Robinhood had some cancelled trades in the overnight session but had been operational since the market opened Monday.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was among those who theorized the outage was an attempt to stop panic from doing further damage to the market.
“These brokerage firms are reporting errors for retail investors while institution investors are able to make trades,” she wrote. “That’s too many platforms to be a coincidence. Controlled to stop panic selling in order to prevent a crash. Go ahead, call me a conspiracy theorist, I could care less. But I’ll challenge you back. Prove me wrong.”
Blue Ocean CEO Brian Hyndman, however, told TND the outage was not an attempt to quell an anxious market and was instead due to a technical shortcoming.
“Blue Ocean had a technology issue,” Hyndman said. “[Robinhood] didn’t ask us to go down. There’s no direct relationship there where they were trying to dampen volatility. This is really Blue Ocean just having an overall capacity issue.”
“I don’t think that there’s anything related to Blue Ocean having a capacity issue and quelling the nervousness or the volatility in the U. S. markets,” he added. “I think they’re completely unrelated.”
The issue, Hyndman said, was instead related to the volume of transactions overwhelming his platform.
“Our platform is scaled to handle roughly about 50 million different messages on any given night,” he said. “So we got to that point and on the database side, it ended up, failing.”
Hyndman noted 80% of the data processed by Blue Ocean is for trades originating in Asia. These trades, he noted, contributed to a “global meltdown” in the international market.
“There was a bit of a global meltdown, right?” Hyndman said. “I think the Japanese markets were down in double digits. It was just extreme volume.”
Blue Ocean told TND Tuesday evening it has notified users that it will be opening overnight trading for the Aug. 7 session, starting at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday.
Hyndman explained users should not take the temporary outage as a sign to expect further outages at times of elevated trade.
“[Blue Ocean] shouldn’t be viewed as a fair weather, you know, only trade when the volatility is low,” Hyndman said. “It should be trade whenever you need to manage your risk, whether that’s low volatility or high volatility.”
Robinhood in 2022 took heat from lawmakers after retail traders drove up the price of generally low-value stocks like GameStop, AMC and Blackberry. The company eventually froze trading on these hot stocks and was forced to pay $70 million in fines and restitution to those affected.
