BREAKING STORY: Schwab Down

August 28, 2015

BREAKING STORY

There are growing indications this morning that Charles Schwab is experiencing a widespread outage and customers cannot log in to their accounts either through manual entry of the ID/Password combination or the recently added fingerprint for cellphones.  Attempts to log on are responded to with a message indicating:

This system is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. For urgent trade-related matters, please call us at 800-435-4000.

Callers to that number are experiencing significant delays. It is unclear as of now whether this outage is a software glitch or caused by a hack. You can follow the developing story at Schwab's Twitter account at

https://twitter.com/CharlesSchwab/with_replies

As of 9 AM EDT the firm had not posted any message on its social media pages and had not updated the above "temporarily unavailable" message.

In light of today's likely triple-digit volatility and it being a Friday with many investors looking to make weekend moves, this outage may create significant liability for the brokerage firm.

A larger, looming question is where are the market's regulators? When should we expect some announcement from the Secuities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, and the New York Stock Exchange? Also, just when will Schwab post a notice about this event on its social media pages?

UPDATE

Reports now indicate that the outage is clearing up as of about 9:40 AM EDT. Appears to have been about 2 hours in duration but that's only an approximation based upon the timestamps of some Tweets. 

This now appears on the Schwab Twitter page as of about 9:50 AM EDT:

    1. Schwab sites experienced issues this morning but are now back online. Clients should be able to log in as normal.