eToro, the Israeli-based broker, is once again experiencing technical difficulties which have seen its trading platform down for more than four hours at the time of press.
Whilst the crypto markets are experiencing their worst day of 2021, traders found themselves unable to log in to their eToro accounts from just after 3 pm GMT.
According to status updates on https://status.etoro.com/, “The root cause of the issue has been identified and our developers are working to fix it. Additional information will be provided as soon as possible.”
However, despite a constant stream of messages reading ‘Update – We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.” the popular trading platform planning for an initial public offering (IPO) next year with a valuation of $5 billion, remains down, with its traders unable to log in.
The eToro platform is currently experiencing disrupted service. Our technical teams are working to fix this.
If you're unable to login to manage your positions please use https://t.co/ydRIghscm7
Keep updated on our status here: https://t.co/ieIcXAjuOr
Thank you
— eToroService (@eToroService) February 23, 2021
The https://offlinemode.etoro.co/ site given by eToro support was also down at the time of writing*
Tuesday’s elongated outrage comes as the crypto markets plummeted, losing more than $200 billion in value within just 24 hours. Nearly all cryptocurrencies are still in a sea of red with heavy losses for Bitcoin – down 15%, Ethereum – down 16%, Bitcoin Cash down 21%, and XRP sinking more than 23%.
However, this is not the first time that eToro has experienced outages in highly volatile market conditions with eToro’s services heavily disrupted at the end of January as eToro and other online trading apps struggled to cope with surging demand from retail investors.
eToro Traders Vent Anger as Outage Drags On
As the eToro outage continued, a number of frustrated traders took to Twitter to vent their anger:
Platform down for almost 4h in a day as red as today???
With this much volatility on the market, how can a broker be down for this much hour because of a « technical issue »? Second time in less than a month, that’s not acceptable.— The Walker 🚶🏼♂️ (@by_niiiico) February 23, 2021
I will bet you they will not recover from this downtime till tomorrow, accounts showing 0 will take some serious testing before going live again #etoro #etorodown
— Robin And The Dog ⌘ (@RobinAndTheDog) February 23, 2021
No official explanation has been provided by eToro and at this stage, it is not clear just how many accounts are affected, where the technical difficulties are being experienced, and how long eToro is going to be down. The official response given to FortuneZ’ requests for further information was:
“We are currently experiencing disrupted service. We are working hard to resolve this as quickly as we can.”
“We apologise to any clients impacted by this disrupted service.”
*UPDATE – eToro has contacted FortuneZ to inform us that the backup trader is now operational. A spokesperson said:
“Our backup trader (offline mode) is fully functional and a vital tool for people to see their positions and be reassured that the platform has not been compromised.”
“We are working closely with senior executives at Microsoft to resolve the issue.”
(Photo: etoro)
