JTrader and PatSystems locking up today?

I heard a report about traders all over the world having their accounts locked while they were in a position today and not being able to get out of it. Apparently even when they phoned their brokers, the broker couldn't unlock their accounts to get them out of a possition. This happened at the high of day today and just before the market broke. Rumor that people knew that these accounts were locked and that traders couldn't get out of long positions and so were hitting the market with sell orders. This is just what I heard and no idea if any of this is true.

I believe that this only happened with PatSystems and so only affected people who have PatSystems as their back-end trading platform. I know that J-Trader uses PatSystems (is part of PatSystems) and one of the ways that you can connect NinjaTrader is throught PatSystems.

Anybody else have any info on this?

It was not a fault of Pats or JTrader persee but the broker who is one of the larger (volume wise) brokers and this is not a first for them. I believe its a case that they actually have too much business vs their bandwidth and consequently their servers crash when everyone trying to get through the gateway at the same time. Your suggestion that the broker could not unlock their clients accounts was not strictly true. As long as you knew what your position was they were fully capable of taking and executing a verbal order. Just that you would not like the fills thats all. average slippage in Dow was 20 points between them answering their phones and you giving the order and them endlessly repeatung the thing back before finally they got the order done. In EU the average slippage was similar. Luckily I had a backup broker and thats the lesson to learn.

Thanks alleyb. It's uncomfortable to think that the technology is at fault (which it wasn't in this case) and is more reassuring that it's a case of just overloading a system. The reason that I find this comforting is that this problem (if what you say is accurate) would have been avoidable if the broker in question had more capacity.

Thanks for setting the record straight.