I feel for the TopStep community today. ProjectX being offline has started to feel like an all too familiar experience, rather than an isolated technical hiccup.
Once again, TopStep’s ProjectX platform has gone down, adding to a growing list of outages and abrupt changes that have frustrated traders over recent months.
For a firm that markets itself as the leading futures prop firm, this level of disruption is difficult to defend. Traders depend on consistent, reliable access, especially around the US market open, yet these interruptions increasingly arrive at the worst possible moment.
The bigger issue is not just the downtime itself, but the silence that surrounds it. TopStep offers little insight into what is going wrong, why problems so often coincide with peak trading hours, or whether platform updates are being rolled out at inappropriate times. Instead, traders are met with the same vague apology about technical issues. The result is uncertainty, missed opportunities and a growing sense that the firm is not being upfront with the people who rely on its systems.
While TopStep does void trades that are active during outages, this only addresses part of the problem. Traders who are locked out entirely receive no meaningful consideration for the lost opportunities they cannot recover. Practical steps would go a long way here. Clear explanations, advance warnings where possible and tangible gestures such as free resets tied to platform failures would show that the firm takes responsibility rather than treating outages as an unavoidable inconvenience.
Also see:
TopStep Down Again: Two Days of Silence, Two Days of Failure
CEO Michael Patak has issued apologetic posts on X, but apologies alone no longer carry much weight. When instability becomes routine, trust erodes quickly. A company that claims to offer professional grade trading infrastructure needs to back that up with accountability, clear timelines for fixes and a genuine commitment to keeping the platform online when it matters most. Until then, confidence in ProjectX will continue to slip, and patience within the community is running out.