A glitch in trading platform Robinhood was identified this morning giving four-times the amount of Apple ($AAPL) shares purchased to investors.
Following Apple’s 4-to-1 stock split, a bug was identified on Robinhood’s platform from 9:00am to 9:06am where users who purchased $AAPL at the new price were being assigned four-times the stock ordered, despite the split already taking place.
The bug was quickly identified by the brokerage and as a temporary fix, the platform was entirely shut down for the rest of the day so the engineering team could sort things out.
It is no surprise that Apple’s recent 4-for-1 stock split left Robinhood engineer’s heads spinning this weekend, as this comes months after an earlier critical error where the broker’s code didn’t account for leap year, for the second leap year in a row, which crippled the platform for the entire trading day.
It is unknown if the Robinhood users will be able to keep their free Apple shares.
A public statement in May made by Robinhood COO Friar Tuck stated “A junior engineer on our team has accidentally deleted the passwords to our central database. While your data is still safe, customer services will be inactive indefinitely”, so it is possible that the brokerage still maintains no internal access to customer information.
