Investors have increasingly reported disruptions occurring during periods of heightened market activity, including prior incidents involving trading restrictions, delayed executions, and system slowdowns. While any single outage may be attributed to technical failure, repeated disruptions can raise more serious concerns about system capacity, infrastructure investment, and risk management practices.

On January 28, 2021, Robinhood and several other brokerages abruptly restricted trading in GameStop, AMC, and other heavily shorted stocks, citing clearinghouse deposit requirements and extreme volatility. Retail investors found themselves unable to buy and faced strict position-closing-only (PCO) trading restrictions.