What happens to traders if the platform goes down?

Quick answer

During an outage, traders cannot open, modify or close positions, and their risk is frozen in place while the market moves. A good firm communicates quickly, reviews affected accounts, and reinstates or compensates traders whose accounts were harmed by the outage rather than by their own trading.

Detailed answer

A practical outage policy:

  • Communicate on your status page, email and community channels.
  • Identify affected accounts: positions open during the outage.
  • Review breaches that occurred during or immediately after.
  • Remedy: reinstate accounts, extend time limits or issue a free retry.
  • Record decisions for consistency.

Rule enforcement after an outage matters too: a platform that catches up on missed ticks might breach accounts based on prices nobody could act on. Decide your policy in advance. PropExecutor records the time and reason of each breach, which makes it straightforward to identify accounts affected by a particular window.

Prepare the message in advance

Draft a short incident message now, with placeholders for times and affected services, so you can publish it within minutes when needed. Speed of communication matters more than detail in the first hour.

Afterwards, publish a short summary of what happened and what changed, which tends to restore confidence quickly.

PropExecutor team · Updated

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