Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard suffer internet outages

Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group Inc. are among several major financial services firms whose websites were hit by a widespread internet outage Thursday. 

More than 8,500 user reports indicated that Fidelity Investments experienced outages around 12 p.m. ET while 555 users reported problems at Vanguard since 11:57 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector.

“Fidelity Investments customers experienced problems accessing several of our websites and applications for a brief period earlier today,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “The issue has been resolved and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. The cause was related to a third-party vendor issue.”

Charles Schwab has been having problems since 11:48 a.m. ET, according to 1,211 user reports. 

“An earlier issue with clients experiencing intermittent issues accessing our website has been resolved,” a Schwab spokesperson said in an email. “This was related to a broader issue affecting multiple companies across industries. In the interim, we were able to direct our clients to access their accounts through our mobile app.”

Other major companies, including Coinbase, Interactive Brokers, Delta Air Lines, Capital One, Southwest Airlines and Salesforce.com were among those whose websites showed loading failures. 

Akamai, a content delivery network (CDN) services provider for the world’s largest companies, said via its website at 1:09 p.m. ET that it was investigating an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service, which could be the source of the widespread outages. The company, along with Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard have since resolved the issues.

“Earlier this afternoon, Vanguard experienced brief connectivity issues impacting vanguard.com,” a Vanguard spokesperson said in an email. “The issue has been resolved and full access has been restored. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank clients for their patience.”

Meanwhile Akamai confirmed, via Twitter, that the outages were not a part of a cyberattack.

It’s not uncommon for online trading and wealth management websites to go dark amid widespread internet outages. Most recently, the unprecedented periods of market volatility since March 2020 coupled with a spike in user volume have exposed cracks in online brokerage platforms. 

A handful of trading and wealth management websites have experienced technical difficulties over the last year as a result of unprecedented volumes of activity. For example, Charles Schwab, ETrade Financial Corp., TD Ameritrade Inc., Robinhood Inc., Fidelity Investments Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co Inc. and Vanguard all experienced some sort of technical difficulty — from login issues to slower processing speeds — while trading volumes surged, according to DownDetector.