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Schwab site suffers outage
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February 18, 2000: 4:16 p.m. ET
Customer accounts inaccessible for half hour; cause still unknown
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Charles Schwab's online investing site suffered a brief outage Friday, making its customer accounts inaccessible through the Internet.
"We're still investigating the cause of this problem," said Glen Mathison, a Schwab spokesman.
From about 1:45 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EST, customers could not log on to their accounts through the Web site at www.eschwab.com, Mathison said.
The company currently is investigating the cause of the outage, but Mathison declined to provide further details.
The Schwab outage came as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agents are seeking those responsible for a slew of "denial of service" attacks on high-profile Web sites earlier this month, including E*Trade and CNN.com.
Hackers not likely to blame
Mathison said that the company has not turned up anything as yet that would suggest Friday's Schwab outage was caused by hackers.
"I think it would be irresponsible to speculate at all that this was some sort of attack," Mathison said. He would not provide a time table under which the company expects to know what caused the problem.
Friday's outage was one in a long string of technical snags for the discount broker. The company in recent months has been plagued by technical glitches.
In October, Schwab's online trading systems suffered three straight days of sporadic problems, at one point grinding to a halt for nearly 2-1/2 hours. The company had similar access problems again in November.
Schwab executives blamed some of those problems on software glitches that cropped up after upgrading its systems to handle more trading volume. 
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