Online brokers crippled by Brexit woes

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

Angry investors on Friday flooded the social media feeds of TD Ameritrade and Fidelity Investments with complaints after the financial websites were overwhelmed and crashed following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

Hundreds of users reported they were unable to log in to their accounts or that the websites had slowed to a crawl.

The slowdown occurred just as many users were extremely interested in what was happening with global financial markets.

Voters in the United Kingdom shocked the world early Friday by choosing to leave the European Union -- a move that sharply contracted economic markets and sent the value of the British pound plummeting to historic lows.

“Could not place a single trade the first half hour of trading,” one exasperated TD Ameritrade user tweeted. “All trading platforms (mobile/desktop) were totally frozen.”

Nebraska-based TD Ameritrade responded to complaints by apologizing for the slowdown.

“Everything should be running normally at this time,” the company said.

Still, users of both companies claimed systems were malfunctioning well into the day.

“Days like this are a good measure as to the quality of your broker,” and the company “is nothing short of a miserable failure,” said one TD Ameritrade user.

“Did Brexit cause your web servers to crash?” one Fidelity user blankly asked the company via Twitter.

“The site should be up and working now,” Fidelity, an online broker based in Boston, claimed in a statement.

As Fidelity and TD Ameritrade users struggled to even look at their holdings, stocks in the U.S. and Britain plunged amid Brexit anxieties.

The Dow Jones industrial average, Nasdaq composite and S&P 500 were all down at least 3 percent in afternoon trading.

Approximately $675 billion in U.S. market value vanished by Friday afternoon, according to market capitalization metrics of the Wilshire 5000 index.