© Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Yesterday and today, the enthusiasm for joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin overwhelmed Robinhood, leading to "sporadic crypto order failures and delayed notifications for some customers," Robinhood wrote in a blog post.
"These interruptions aren't acceptable to us," Robinhood wrote in its post. "We believe we're the most intuitive crypto platform for Dogecoin traders and we're proud to be a top choice for this community."
Robinhood has a history of exactly this kind of whoopsie. In March 2020, there were three huge outages which Robinhood has said were due to "stress on our infrastructure." And infamously, in January, Robinhood limited trades on GameStop, pissing off the entire internet and getting itself hauled in front of Congress in the process because it hadn't planned for anything approaching the scale of Gamestonk.
Look, the app is very pretty and easy to use, but if it fails during the most crucial buying and selling periods, are users going to stick with it? Whether you make money on your Dogecoin trade matters more than than how nice the app is. Besides, there's the now-public Coinbase platform to trade cryptocurrency on anyway.
The Robinhood post, frustratingly, doesn't go into the technical details that could have let users know how serious the failure was, or why it happened. I've emailed Robinhood to ask for some of these details, and will update if the company responds.
In conclusion, I must once again beg for the Robinhood S-1, which I need in order to live. I must know what the risk factors section looks like, and if these kinds of outages are significant enough to the company to be listed there.