Vlad Tenev

It was just shut off?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was there an announcement or no?

There were some announcements, but they were very sort of corporate, legalese sort of thing.

And also, you don't know what's going to happen next.

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective as the person running the platform, there were a few things going on in my mind, right?

Number one, we had a sizable PR issue in March of the previous year, which was at the beginning of the whole COVID shutdown and Robinhood was growing like crazy, where it was like a total platform outage.

So the whole platform, every stock was out for- How long was that for?

It was for one full trading day at first, but then there were kind of aftershocks where there was another outage for a couple of hours.

Do you know what caused those?

Intense load and our systems not really being ready for it because our load probably went like 10x in the span of a pretty short period of time.

Understood.

So in the back of my mind, as this whole GameStop situation was unfolding and we were climbing the App Store ranks, at one point on January 27th, we were the number one downloaded app in the country.

Wow.

Not even financial app.

We were ahead of like TikTok and Instagram.

Yeah, yeah.

Very interesting.

Everyone was downloading Robinhood.

Yeah.