I just reached the MBT guys about what happened this morning. Townsend Analystics operates some of the price servers which feed them (and many other firms - which explains the reports here that other firms were down), and they encountered some kind of database issue this morning which corrupted MBT's permissioning servers. Soon after the open, MBT was dealing with 3 of 4 of their price servers being non-functional, and they were working feverishly to try to figure it out. Some users stayed logged on & trading through it all, operating off the one remaining functioning price server (I was fine, for example, until I logged out of RTIII to reset). The good news is they did determine exactly what happened with the database to cause this, and are confident that it has been fixed so it can't happen again.
I'd say they handed it pretty smoothly and competently, which is typical for MBT. Never fun being down, but it's good to know they're on the ball when it happens. It is a vast difference from a firm like ETrade, where this sort of thing happens routinely, you can't get information, and they do not appear to be that concerned about it.
The other thing to note about MBT is, when this sort of rare downtime event happens, they maintain a staff of brokers who you can reach to place buy and sell orders, as long as you have a backup source for quotes/charts, like QCharts. Many (most) daytrading brokers will only allow you to close a position, if you can reach them.
Back up and trading, RTIII rock-solid for several hours now!
-Steve |
