Robinhood's options trading stopped working, and customers are furious over the money they say they lost

Robinhood

• Robinhood faced significant outages with its options trading services Wednesday.
• Some Robinhood customers attempting to access options trading Wednesday morning received a message stating "Account Deactivated" and were directed to the company's support email address without given further explanation of the issue. 
• Users turned to social media to voice their anger.

Robinhood, the trading app that has risen in popularity due to its no-fee brokerage business, faced significant outages with its options trading services Wednesday, keeping customers out of their accounts and preventing them from closing out open positions.

Some Robinhood customers attempting to access options trading Wednesday morning received a message stating "Account Deactivated" and were directed to the company's support email address without given further explanation of the issue. 

A Robinhood spokesperson told Business Insider the outage impacted "a smaller percentage of customers" and trading was limited, "as a precautionary measure."

"We experienced an outage with options trading, affecting a smaller percentage of customers, and we limited trading for some as a precautionary measure. The majority of affected accounts have had their trading ability restored, and we're working to restore access for the other subset," the spokesperson said.  

Users turned to social media to voice their anger. On Robinhood's Reddit page, the first mention of trouble came from a thread posted at 9:04 AM EST in which the user said its option order was reject.  

Robinhood first directly acknowledged the issue when responding to a tweet at 10:36 AM EST.

Less than 20 minutes later, Robinhood issued a tweet stating it had "temporarily shut down options trading" and was "working to restore service ASAP".

Users impacted by the outage also received an email from the company.

Dan DeFrancesco/Business Insider

Letter from Robinhood explaining issue with users' accounts.

Robinhood sent a follow-up email when accounts had been re-activated, offering three months of Robinhood Gold, the app's premium service, for free. 

Dan DeFrancesco/Business Insider

Letter from Robinhood after users' accounts were activated again.

That didn't stop customers from pointing out the losses they faced in the market from not being able to access their accounts. 

This morning, Robinhood tweeted again, stating it had been working on the issue overnight.

However, users continued to tweet at the company, describing losses they felt they faced due to the outage.

As of 1:00 PM EST, Robinhood was still working to restore access to accounts and options trading, according to its status page, stating "nearly all accounts have been resorted."

The outage comes at an inopportune for the app, which announced Thursday it would begin offering checking and savings accounts to customers as part of its overall goal to "democratize America's financial system."