Wealthsimple has had 85 platform incidents in 14 months including a 7-day outage and a 68-hour account lockout. Here’s what you can do about it.
TL;DR: Wealthsimple went dark for 3 hours on May 11 while clients had live orders. I reviewed their public status page going back 14 months (85 incidents, a 7-day outage, a 68-hour account lockout, and a pattern of failures right after maintenance windows). This may constitute a CIRO regulatory violation. File a free complaint at ciro.ca
So this happened to me on Monday and I’m still annoyed about it.
I had orders on Wealthsimple during the morning session on May 11. At some point I noticed my activity feed had gone completely dark. No order status. No notifications. Nothing. I couldn’t tell if my orders were filled, working, or sitting in limbo. I tried to cancel one. Nothing happened. I tried chat support. Non-functional. I called. Couldn’t get through.
My orders eventually filled at prices I wouldn’t have accepted if I’d been able cancel/modify an order in the first place. By the time I had any visibility into what was going on, it was too late.
Here’s the thing though. This isn’t just a bad day or a one-off glitch. I went down a rabbit hole on their status page after it happened. What I found is genuinely wild for a platform that holds people’s TFSAs, RRSPs, and investment accounts:
Below is what their own status page confirms for May 11, 2026:
🔴 Activity feed completely down: 10:15 AM to 1:07 PM (nearly 3 hours during active market hours).
🔴 International transfers down: 1:46 PM – 3:46 PM
🔴 CAD to USD wires down: 5:25 PM – 7:01 PM
…That’s three separate incidents. One day. Right after a scheduled maintenance window the night before.
Ok, so now I’m curious and decide to go through the last 14 months of history on their status page only to get my mind blown:
🔴 85 incidents in 14 months. About 6 per month.
🔴 A 7-day open “System Issues” incident in August 2025. Seven consecutive days?! WTF.
🔴 A 68-hour account service outage in February 2026. Nearly 3 full trading days where clients couldn’t access their accounts!
🔴 A 26-hour live chat outage in August 2025 where their support channel was down.
🔴 19 separate incidents labeled only as “System Issues”… zero elaboration on what was broken or who was affected. Yeah, that’s definitely suss.
🔴 A recurring pattern of outages occurring on the business day immediately following scheduled maintenance windows. May 11 fits this pattern perfectly as maintenance ran May 9 and May 10, failures hit May 11.
This isn’t a ‘glitch’ that just happened because Mike forgot to install a patch. This is a platform with a documented, recurring structural problem that keeps getting logged under vague labels while clients absorb the cost.
So here’s why this matters:
Wealthsimple is a CIRO-registered investment dealer. It’s a regulatory designation that comes with specific legal obligations.
One of those obligations is maintaining systems that allow you to monitor and manage your live orders during market hours. Another is delivering trade confirmations promptly. Another is maintaining a business continuity plan that actually prevents this kind of failure, especially AFTER a maintenance window.
When their activity feed goes dark for nearly 3 hours during a trading session and you can’t see, cancel, or modify a working order, that’s not only frustrating, but its also a potential breach of CIRO’s rules.
I’m not making this up. The specific rules at issue are:
IDPC Rules 3120/3121 + NI 23-101 (order handling and best execution obligations)
IDPC Rules 3808/3816 (trade confirmation delivery)
IDPC Rules 4710–4714 (business continuity planning)
IDPC Rules 3900/3955 (supervision as an OEO order execution only dealer)
And yeah, this affects anyone who had live orders on May 11 (not just degen options traders). So, if you had a live order between 10:15 AM and 1:07 PM and couldn’t see its status, couldn’t cancel it, or couldn’t modify it while the market moved around you, you were affected and it probably cost you money.
Now here’s what bothers me most about this. It’s not the outage. Platforms go down. It happens. What bothers me is the pattern. 85 incidents in 14 months. Vague labels that tell clients nothing. Failures hitting like clockwork after maintenance windows. Most people just absorb it and move on. That’s exactly what Wealthsimple is counting on.
So here’s what you can do:
1.) File a free regulatory complaint directly with CIRO (Canada’s national investment dealer regulator) at ciro.ca. You do not need a lawyer. It is completely free. You can file whether or not you’ve already complained to Wealthsimple directly. That’s it. Keep it simple.
CIRO tracks complaint volumes. A spike in complaints about the same incident from multiple clients is exactly what triggers a formal investigation. One complaint is a data point. A hundred complaints is something they cant hide under a rug.
2.) Email Wealthsimple, complain, cite how you were impacted, quote the above IDPC rules, use the data in their own status page and make a case to have your account corrected/credited.
Note: All incident data is sourced directly from Wealthsimple’s own public status page at status.wealthsimple.com. Filing a CIRO complaint is a legally protected activity, Wealthsimple cannot penalize you for doing so. Also, I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. Like most of you, I’m just really really really angry about why these things keep happening and why they refuse to do anything about it.
Hope this helps. ❤️