GAO report on outages at online trading sites
Another government agency weighs in on the lack of public reporting of outage information. Early this year the FCC was working on a "voluntary" method for ISPs to report outages. So far, I haven't heard of a single ISP voluntering. This week the General Accounting Office issued a report on online trading web sites, and the lack of disclosure about network problems and system outages. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/is/20000609/bs/watching_the_stock_watchers_1.ht...
Watching the Stock Watchers (The Industry Standard) When a system outage occurs at your online brokerage, the only way you might find out is if you're stuck in the middle of a trade or if the media reports the outage. But it happens more frequently than is reported.
Many outages occur in small geographic areas and for just a short amount of time. But brokerages aren't required to disclose these outages to customers, the Securities and Exchange Commission or to any other regulatory body. Many times they don't even keep records of their own on small outages.
The U.S. General Accounting Office has a problem with that. [...]
The full GAO report is http://www.gao.gov/new.items/gg00043.pdf One interesting statistic was 11 firms reported a total of 88 outages between January and September 1999. About 40 percent of the outages lasted for less than 25 minutes, but some firms didn't track any outage lasting less than 25 minutes. So there may be a statistical problem with the data. For comparison, the telephone industry reported a total of 170 outages between July 1998 and June 1999. The telephone industry doesn't track most outages lasting less than 30 minutes (except for a few special catagories). Even if you normalize for 3/4 of a year, it seems the Internet is actually more reliable than the telephone network. Or, what I suspect is really happening, both the telephone industries and the online brokers statistics are measuring the wrong stuff. But the real $64000 question is during periods of market volitility, would you be able to reach a broker by telephone easier than you would be able to access an online trading web site. The GAO didn't really answer that question.
On 11 Jun 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
One interesting statistic was 11 firms reported a total of 88 outages between January and September 1999. About 40 percent of the outages lasted for less than 25 minutes, but some firms didn't track any outage lasting less than 25 minutes. So there may be a statistical problem with the data. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Even if you normalize for 3/4 of a year, it seems the Internet is actually more reliable than the telephone network. Or, what I suspect is really happening, both the telephone industries and the online brokers statistics are measuring the wrong stuff.
Something like 80% of all statistics are wrong and 40% are made up? :) As an Etrade customer, I can tell you I wouldn't buy those stats if you were paying me to take them. They have outages far more frequently, though I just looked at the PDF and they're talking about outages in the actual trading process. Etrade's most frequent issue is the portfolio function not functioning, or in some cases actually malfunctioning. Friday night, I was trying to view my portfolio and it was down. I kept clicking on the portfolio tab, and after a few clicks it came up, but all the stock prices were off the wall. My espi had jumped from around 4 to 90-114 depending on which batch of shares you looked at...that's right...the same stock was reported with multiple different "current price"'s. What good is access to online trading if you can't view your portfolio to see your positions in order to decide what to trade? But what does any of this have to do with operating a network? Are you saying we're next and will eventually have to report all outages to the man? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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Sean Donelan