Today's difficulties and your postings to this board received mention in Today's WALL STREET JOURNAL.
I started this board after experiencing multiple "unacknowledged" problems last year and can relate to your frustration today. Fortunately, I had no positions to work this morning.
However, It still amazes me that redundancy remains lacking in Schwab's - and apparently other firms' - systems. I trade several hundred times per year, and while I've seen improvement in Schwab's WWW site, it still needs work to be "world class". It bothers me that software glitches seem to pop up at the open. Doesn't anyone test the software changes made during the night? Do they simply "turn it on" and hope for the best?
And about the "$500 commission credit" available "at any Schwab branch". How many people are going to leave their offices, homes or wherever to find a Schwab branch and execute a trade? I for one live 110 miles from a Schwab branch. This "commission credit" is a public relations stunt - nothing more.
Anyway, below is the WSJ article:
Computer Failure Knocks Out Schwab's Online Trading Unit
An INTERACTIVE JOURNAL News Roundup
The Wall Street Journal - February 24, 1999
Charles Schwab Corp.'s online trading service was knocked out for more than an hour Wednesday morning by a computer failure, sending clients of the biggest Internet brokerage firm scrambling for an alternate way to trade.
Charles Schwab spokeswoman Tracey Gordon said a software problem with the system's main servers apparently developed overnight, and that technicians are still trying to determine what brought the system down. The outage began just as the trading day was beginning, she said, and service was restored at 11:09 a.m. EST.
The online brokerage advised customers to conduct trades through its automated telephone system during the outage, and charged its discounted Web-commission rate for those trades. The San Francisco company said it has increased staffing for its toll-free 800 number.
But Ms. Gordon said the phone system was swamped, and said customers were subjected to waits of "several minutes." Because of that, Schwab said it gave customers a $500 commission credit to use during the outage at any local Schwab branch.
As has been the case with previous outages with other brokers, online message-board participants were among the first to register their gripes. Users of a "Complaints About Schwab" message board on the Silicon Investor Web site (www.techstocks.com) complained about a variety of problems, including strange error messages and gibberish that appeared on their trading screens.
The outage is Schwab's third this year, and the latest suffered by the online brokerage industry, which has suffered from a series of growing pains as it deals with a massive increase in trading activity.
Schwab's rival, E*Trade Group Inc., experienced a series of problems recently tied to a software upgrade that went amiss. Schwab's two other outages were much shorter than Wednesday's; most recently, the service was unavailable for10 to 15 minutes on Feb. 17 because of problems with the back-end mainframe.
Schwab reported last week that its Web site handle handled an average of 153,000 online trades a day in January. "We're looking at increasing capacity to two or three times our peak volume," said Ms. Gordon. |
