Banks report disruptions as traders pile into BlackBerry, GameStop shares

Photo: The Canadian Press

The RBC Royal Bank of Canada logo is seen in Dartmouth, N.S. on Tuesday, April 2, 2019. At least one Canadian bank experienced online banking outages this morning, amid an surge in trading of some stocks.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

TORONTO - Stock halts and trading platform outages disrupted markets as Canadian investors joined an internet-based frenzy and piled into stocks such as BlackBerry, GameStop and AMC Entertainment.

Trading in BlackBerry shares was halted twice Wednesday by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada as the Toronto-listed shares surged more than 40 per cent and recorded nearly three times its average volume.

Investing forum TradingView says its website saw a 514 per cent increase in Canadian visitors to its BlackBerry stock page in the past three days and a 1,500 per cent increase in Canadians clicking on its GameStop stock page.

An RBC spokeswoman says there was a brief intermittent outage in online banking Wednesday morning that has since been resolved, after the bank tweeted that access to RBC Direct Investing had been temporarily unavailable.

TD Canada Trust said through its Twitter account that there had been a service disruption and that its investing help line was receiving a very high volumes of calls resulting in long wait times.

While the banks did not identify the cause of the disruptions, the outages come amid a social-media based push that has fuelled huge price gains and high trading volume for BlackBerry, GameStop and other stocks.