Schwab receives about 60 percent of its trading orders through the site. Online brokers have struggled with numerous delays and outages in recent months as the exploding popularity of Internet trading put a heavy strain on their computer systems. Schwab was still searching for the cause of its latest mishap, which prevented customers from executing trades, reading analyst reports and reviewing their portfolios, the spokeswoman said. Compensation not considered Schwab has no plans to offer its customers any compensation for the failure because the firm provided other means for them to make a trade, such as an automated telephone service, Gordon said.
People automatically go to other channels.
In response to the surge in demand for its services, Schwab over the next two months will increase the site's capacity to handle nearly 250,000 orders at a time, compared with 10,000 last year, Gordon said. It also plans to expand by 40 percent the number of calls its automated service could handle by June, she said, adding that it now could deal with some 6,500 calls at a time. Schwab is also adding 600 to 800 people to its 4,000-strong team of phone representatives. There appears to be some problems with some customers accessing the trading page specifically. After a year of first-class cruising on DSL, I got bumped back to steerage.