I avoided IB for a while based in part on the negativity I heard here. Finally realized that no one could give me the combination of Universal account and stability (CIPF protected here in Canada) that they could. I don't use TWS to trade (Button Trader). My only complaint is from this week. TWS wouldn't open properly (error message). I called support and they directed me to tech support, whom I had never spoken to. Tech support was a joke. The guy had no clue, none whatsoever. He was doing what my telco does when I call with a problem - he was entering keywords into the system to see if it came up with a document which would help him solve my issue. He couldn't and he said 'Hmmmm' about 10 times (no exaggeration). Then he told me to uninstall and reinstall Java.
The worst part was, when I asked him to stay on the line with me while I uninstalled Java, in order to see if it solved my issue, he refused. He said they were 'experiencing high call volume'.
Now, I am not the biggest customer by any means, probably about $700/month in commish. However, I figure that the guy could have at least stayed on line and seen if his fix worked. It took all of 3 minutes to uninstall and reinstall Java, and he had been hemming and hawing and entering god-knows-what on his terminal for 10 minutes before that.
His fix failed completely. I called Hong Kong that night and a guy there finally got me up and running, although he was not even a tech support guy.
if I had lost money during the outage a few Fridays back, or as a result of this latest corruption of TWS, I would probably be singing a different tune. Bottom line is that so far, they have been fine, operationally. I am perfectly happy with the fills.