Stock-trading apps fall under the feet of stampeding panicking investors

As stock markets suffered a bit of a wobble today, share-trading apps and sites fell over as investors barreled in to see how badly their portfolios had been hit.

Depending on your perspective, Monday was either a global meltdown or a passing dip.

Billionaire Wall Street ace Warren Buffett - who previously said if you can't handle a corrective drop, you shouldn't own stocks - had $15 billion wiped from his Berkshire Hathaway investment empire in the past few hours. Before the weekend, Buffett's firm had dumped more than half of its Apple holdings, which perhaps helped fuel some of the panic today.

At time of writing in the US, after a rough start followed by some recovery, the Dow is down about 2.3 percent, the S&P 500 2.7 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite 3.2 percent. In the UK, the FTSE 100 was down two percent, and 2.8 percent for the FTSE 250. The Nikkei 225 index earlier plunged, eventually closing 12 percent down, with Japanese stocks suffering their worst crash since the late 1980s.

Big Tech was feeling the heat, with Google down about 2.7 percent, Apple down 5.5 percent, Nvidia nearly 7 percent, Microsoft more than 3 percent, and Meta nearly 3 percent. Cryptocurrencies also took a big hit, with Bitcoin dipping briefly below $50,000 apiece.

Amid this turmoil, users had trouble getting into and using the likes of Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard, judging from netizens' complaints of outages on DownDetector.com.

"Due to a technical issue, some clients may have difficulty logging in to Schwab platforms," the biz told its customers earlier this morning.

"Please accept our apologies as our teams work to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Hold times may be longer than usual."

The brokerage firm just updated us with this: "A technical issue experienced by some clients has been resolved. We apologize to our clients for the inconvenience."

Meanwhile, Fidelity noted in a media statement: "We are aware some customers experienced intermittent issues earlier today. This is now resolved."

Interactive Brokers said it was still operational, and Robinhood was too, though the latter paused overnight trading temporarily as investors braced for an incoming Black Monday.

What's the cause of the drop today? A lot of things. There is a global market sell-off, though generally speaking mainstream stocks are still higher today than they were a year-ago. Even the crypto-meme-coin Dogecoin is up 26 percent versus this time in 2023.

There are growing concerns of a slowing economy or recession in America, and of a looming war between Iran and Israel; that over-hyped AI has overcooked the market and the bubble is about to burst; that interest rates have been too high for too long and may need to be cut in short order in the US; and more.

Probably a good day to go outside and enjoy some fresh air. ®