By now, the entire market is aware that there was a major outage at the investor app Robinhood on Monday just as the market experienced the highest one-day point gain in its history.
Not good, to put it mildly.
Then, on Tuesday, we learned that the tech outages were still ongoing.
We immediately received media outreach from firms looking to add commentary to any stories we planned to write on the event, since Robinhood is now officially a fintech unicorn, with a $7.6 billion market valuation as of July 2019, raising well over $800 million in funding through its Series E rounds.
Stop for a moment and think about that number.
Now don’t get us wrong. Robinhood has some impressive backers, including Sequoia Capital and DST Global. They launched to much fanfare in 2013 via an app offering free stock trades, and were labeled the edgy, startup darling of the trading universe for some time.
But now they look positively foolish. The firm had grown in scale massively, with millions of customers investing through the app. Now, as a guy or gal carrying their iPhone around and trading Apple or Bitcoin, you might not think about what goes on in the background to make that trade happen.
It turns out you should.
“Fintech organizations are under pressure to provide new levels of speed, accuracy, and innovation, and always-on availability,” said Bob Moul, CEO of machine data intelligence platform Circonus. “Now more than ever, companies competing in the fintech space need infrastructure monitoring that can help them map out a data strategy that can accommodate for peak demand like the one they experienced on Monday.”
Translation – make sure your tech stack is in order.