Software glitch suspected cause of Charles Schwab outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Charles Schwab Corp.'s Web site suffered a brief outage Friday afternoon, preventing customers of the No. 1 U.S. discount brokerage from funneling stock orders through the Internet for 30 minutes.

A software error probably caused the problem, a spokesman said, adding Schwab was still investigating. The outage was not brought about by computer hackers purposely sabotaging the site, the spokesman said.

U.S. and Canadian law enforcement agencies have been looking for the hackers whom they say briefly closed down some of the Internet's most popular sites last week, including those of Yahoo! Inc. and Schwab rival E+Trade Group Inc.

"We experienced a problem with our electronic channels," the Schwab spokesman said. "We switched over to a back-up system, and some customers would have experienced a problem accessing our electronic systems when we made that transition."

San Francisco-based Schwab is investigating the root cause of the problem, the spokesman said, declining further comment.

The Schwab outage lasted from 1:45 p.m., EST to 2:15 p.m., the spokesman said, but customers could still place stock orders by calling one of Schwab's brokers.

The outage coincided with computer problems at the technical center of the No. 2 U.S. stock exchange, Nasdaq. As a result, the Nasdaq could not update its composite index, which functions as a barometer for technology stocks. Online brokers faced many outages last year. Most firms, including Schwab, beefed up their sites' capacity and added back-up systems.

Link:

http://news.excite.com/news/r/000218/16/financial-schwab-outage

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 18, 2000

Answers

Hmmm ... Charles Schwab said it was fixed by 2:15:

[2:22 PM EST] From: Kid Rock: Schwab down in Missouri.

[3:07 PM EST] From: Probart: $chwab Message: "The Server is not available. Please try again later."

From: Chris Considine: SCREW SCHWAB AND ALL IT's SPIN ON EVERY MEDIA! Damn thing is down for 3 hours and they say they were down for 1/2 hour. They are the masters at Spin City. They are liars - period. And, they went down BEFORE the big day crash ... costing us little guys A LOT.

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002bIF

-- Cheryl (Transplant@Oregon.com), February 18, 2000.