There are no public details about the root cause.
I think RH is bad for people in general, but this pile-on is outrageous.
RH has constantly had issues at least since I started using it over a year ago. I didn't notice it really at first, but I also didn't know much about anything trading related back then. It didn't take long though for me to have my first "incident" where my market orders were seemingly vanishing into the abyss as the underlying moved. I'm not talking seconds, I'm talking minutes. For a market order on high liquidity options. Never mind trying to get filled at anything besides the ask (buying) or bid (selling).
RH has had serious underlying issues for a long time now. This incident didn't happen in vacuum. The writing has been in huge block letters on the wall for a long time.
1. Dealing with other people's money 2. Monitoring/managing other people's health
Generally true, but there is a couple of exceptions to this rule: if everyone knows that the company is brand new and does not have an established reputation, then using that app requires a general acceptance of risk.
Robinhood was brand new, and outages should have been expected. The problem with Robinhood isn't the outage, it's that it was marketed to college students gambling with their parent's money, who know just enough about the stock market to be dangerous, but not enough to invest properly.
Luckily for everyone, those industries are so old, they have accidental redundancy built in (paper records for old doctors who can't be arsed to use a computer, etc.).
It is confirmed they are worse than virtually any reputable brokerage. It might not be their fault directly but its 2020, not 1998
