SHAREBUILDER WEBSITE IS DOWN AGAIN!!! - ING DIRECT CUSTOMERS OUTRAGED OVER LOSING MILLIONS FROM THEIR ACCOUNTS
Based on all the feedback received from my previous blog entry ING DIRECT CUSTOMERS OUTRAGED OVER LOSING MILLIONS FROM THEIR ACCOUNTS posted on October 14, 2008. It appears that ING Direct's Sharebuilder website is experiencing another outage which is vexing its customers. As an IT architect of mission critical systems I find this to be HIGHLY unacceptable. I am assuming the IT folks have not heard of the words HIGH AVAILBLITY or BUSINESS CONTINTIUTY.
Check out some of the comments from readers, there appears to be a discussion of a class action lawsuit:
By Anon (not verified) on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 9:06am.
Seriously... how is this not neglegence after it has happened several times in the past?? I am dumbfounded
By Sean (not verified) on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 9:08am.
Why do I pay these fees for a system I can not access. I'm loosing money every second and I cant get into my account to make the trades. I have already opened an e-trade account, I guess I will move to them. ING you suck!
Phone trade line is "down" too
By Anon (not verified) on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 9:15am.
I just get a busy signal or an operator message when I call their "special dedicated phone line."
By Anon (not verified) on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 9:19am.
It was down yesterday. Did they not think, oh maybe we should FIX OUR SITE overnight???
I like how the message says "We are aware the website is experiencing long load times." Yeah right. Their website isn't loading AT ALL
Ross Mistry, SQL Server MVP, MCTS, MCDBA, MCSE, is a principal consultant and partner with Convergent Computing. As a lead architect, Ross focuses on designing and implementing SQL Server, Windows Server, Active Directory, and Exchange solutions for Fortune 500 organizations with a global presence. His specialties include high availability, migrations, security, consolidation and virtualization. Ross has also been involved with many bestselling books, his latest titles authored include SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration and Windows Server 2008 Unleashed. As a SQL Server MVP, Ross assists the global community by freely sharing his knowledge of SQL Server via posting for newsgroups, blogs and speaking engagements around the world. He frequently speaks at Microsoft, SQL Server North American PASS, SQL Server Europe PASS and Dev Connections.
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WHO can we contact about a class action suit, I AM READY
email, phone anything, i want to freaking sue these dipsh**s for their ice cream money.
I sent an email to SB about the problem, this is what I got.
Dear Investor,
We are aware the website is experiencing long load times and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We understand that an apology may seem inadequate at times like these but we hope that you understand we recognize your time is valuable and we are working to address the website issues and resolve them immediately.
If you have funds available in your money market cash balance and you were trying to place a Real-time Trade, please call 800-747-2537. To place a trade over the phone, please be ready to tell us your account number, the quantity of shares, the stock symbol and the type of order.
Because of the recent market conditions we have received unprecedented trading volumes. Our technology resources from each of our ING DIRECT locations have been working to improve the functionality of our website in order to serve our Customers in the changing market. We have already made several upgrades and are working on several more. Please know that we appreciate your patience and thank you for your continued business.
In the event of website slowness in the future we recommend trying the following suggestions:
In order to avoid website slowness it's important that you do NOT refresh your browser and just let the page load
If the page does not load after 1 minute, open a new browser window and type in www.sharebuilder.com
For basic account maintenance, we suggest logging into your ShareBuilder account online at off peak hours, to ensure timely processing of your request
Please know that we appreciate your patience and thank you for your continued business.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Lemire
Customer Service
ShareBuilder from ING DIRECT
You've Got To Be Kidding Me ING DIRECT!!!! Sharebuilder Outage
Are you kidding me? This is the lame "excuse" they provide to their customers who's losses are I'm sure in the millions; I alone lost a fortune this morning because of their REPEATED negligence. This is the same pathetic excuse they give every time they have an outage, Interesting term they use, "web site slowness". Let’s call it as your customers experienced it, YET ANOTHER OUTAGE, SYSTEM UNAVAILABILITY. You couldn't even get to the home page morons, and in the 1 in 1000 chance you did, users couldn't log into their acct. Oh, and I've never ever heard of any reputable company, who supposablely employee skilled Engineering and Operations personnel, advise customers WHO ARE PAYING A PREMIUM, for their service, to not hit their site too hard –
Mr Customer, because we've failed to make adequate R&D invests, to employee properly skilled engineers, to properly scale and test out our architecture to ensure failover and business continuity measures BUT most importantly, learn from past lessons, PLEASE Mr. Customer, we need for YOU TO CHANGE HOW YOU USE OUR SITE, FROM LANDING ON OUR HOME PAGE TO LOGGING IN TO YOUR ACCT.
I'm an Engineering Director for a Top 5 Internet company, with over 18 million customers, and one of my organizations responsibilities is PERFORMANCE AND ENDURANCE TESTING. We have at any given moment over 50k customers and internal CS reps CONCURRENTLY buying new products, managing acct information, building / provisioning / publishing their websites AND ecommerce hosting customers making purchases from our customers websites AND an multi tier email platform – All Concurrently. In the 9.5 yrs that I’ve been with this company, we have NEVER had an outage due to a poorly designed system or for lack of a redundantly architecture. Even if we were to have an outage, the impact to our end customers, would not be nearly as dire as a trading platform outage.
Their excuse that it’s due to the current economic situation is just bull shit!! That’s the fancy buzz word that corporations are using these days to either lay off hard working folks, from otherwise financially strong companies, to excuses for poor system performance. It’s total bull shit. Everyone’s quite aware that indexes were only up marginally this morning, all well less than 100 points this morning. We’ve seen days where the markets have rallied upwards of 300 points. Furthermore, when the indexes turned negative later in the morning, again, marginally, ING DIRECETs Sharebuilder site was still unavailable as was their CS support due to all circuits busy. Despite the high fees, and losing money in earlier down-times, I stuck around because I believed they would get their act together and learn from those mistakes, clearly, this is not the case and to make matters worse, THEY BLAME THE MARKET CONDITIONS AND THEN THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS FOR HOW THEY’re USING THEIR WEBSITE.
** This is my experience with sharebuilder and the experience of my roommate who also has an account, make whatever you feel is the appropriate decision based on your own research, good luck ***
I lost a lot of money during
I lost a lot of money during yesterday's debacle. Citigroup jumped to $3.85 on opening, and I tried to sell. By the time I got through to "customer service" the stock had dumped to $2.60. All I got was a "sorry for the inconvenience." I am inconvenienced every day. . .that I can deal with. What I can't accept is being robbed. They effectively denied us access to our accounts and froze us out of a volitile market for several hours. So much for "real time trading" capability. I am furious!
I lost too....
Sharebuilders is just about worthless. I have switched my account. I would not recommend them to anyone. It has happened to them several times before and they just don't learn. Total BS and they offered 10 free "market" trades for the inconvenience. Not acceptable, I'd love to see a class action suit filed against these bozos. Count me in.
Beware Of Sharebuilder
***** WARNING WARNING WARNING *****
As a current customer, BEWARE of ING DIRECTS Sharebuilder.com, go to their site now, it's been down all day today and try to call their CS numbers, you can’t get through... I've been a long time and loyal customer and today (3-19-2009) alone I’ve lost $15,000.00 because their website and phone systems have been down and can't support their customers. This is not a onetime occurrence; they’ve had numerous system outages dating back to at least Sept 2008.
If you’re in doubt, simply go to their site right now, www.sharebuilder.com and call their CS number at 800-747-2537 or 866-590-7629.
Again, as a current customer, be forewarned.. Once you have an account and money invested in stocks, it's costly and a time consuming process to transfer them out to another brokerage and this ties up your money during the transfer period..
** This is my experience with sharebuilder and the experience of my roommate who also has an account, make whatever you feel is the appropriate decision based on your own research, good luck ***
wow
I posted the first comment on the old entry yesterday. I was shocked to find that seven pages sprung up to follow that one since then!
I have created a group for anyone who's interested: http://groups.google.com/group/sharebuilder-outage
Come on over and rally! I'd be willing to bet the Terms and Conditions pretty much negate a class action, but I'd sure like to make sure, wouldn't you? At the very least, maybe we can use power in numbers to push the site to finally create a safe place for consumers to trade.
Help to educate fellow investors - Share your ING DIRECT OUTAGE
All fellow investors -
Since it's obvious there's limited, if any, government protection for investors who are repeatedly screwed over by bad management decisions made within their respective brokerage companies, there are however many online tools available to us that could provide, for lack of a better term, brokerage education advisory support to our fellow investors that help them make more informed decisions when choosing a brokerage company. Since folks on this blog have all come together to share some of our experiences, we should continue to reach out to fellow investors and share our experiences with investors on other blog sites everywhere that offer brokerage options and advice. Could start by going to Google blogs and do a blog search on key words ShareBuilder, or ING DIRECT Sharebuilder, and go to those sites and share your experience you've had with Sharebuilder. Had I had this information when I choose my brokerage company, It would have helped me make a more informed decision. Many times companies will respond to customer concerns only after they seem them in writing. Specifically to my company, our social networking / communications organization surfs the web every single day looking for comments from customers who have had, and communicated, both poor and positive experiences when dealing with our company. We call it “ The Voice of the Customer “ and any poor customer experience is reviewed and forwarded to the appropriate departmental Director for action and feedback within a days. ( does not replace our 400+ member CS organization ) And we’re a fortune top 25 company.
Best of Luck to You..
Pretty tired of this
On top of not being able to buy some penny stocks on ShareBuilder, their site goes down. I think I am just going to transfer my money out, or stop investing into ING and open up an account somewhere better like Ameritrade.
Goodbye
i lost thousands due to you clowns today...scottrade here i come.. i wish there was a way to prove my trade request so i can sue you idiots. As a new investor, this is especially impactful.. I will celebrate when your business closes.
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