As with probably everyone else on here who uses IB, I use the IB Mobile TWS app to provide my second factor authentication for TWS Desktop and WebTrader login. For the past few years, it has been fast. After submitting my user-name and password, I get a prompt to confirm my identity on my phone within about 2-4 seconds. However, over the past week or two, I have noticed that it is taking much longer, maybe around 3 minutes or longer. Sometimes like last night, it was fast, but more often lately, it's slow. I notice this lag regardless of the wireless network that I am connected to, even when on cellular. Has anyone else noticed this?
IB Mobile TWS Two-Factor Authentication Delay
- Thread starter ET180
- Start date
Long wait times happen sometimes but I don't recognize any trend. Notifications usually arrive quickly. Today though it was indeed a pretty long wait for me too, so had to use a response code instead due to time constraints. Must have been longer even than the 3 minutes you mention as I started logging in about 10-15 minutes before open to fire up the algos and AFAIR the notification only arrived around opening bell when I was already logged in. Some time mid Summer I once missed it for was several hours, it was a real nasty glitch. Taught me that keeping the two other authentication alternatives ready (response codes from the app and printed card) is essential with IB.
Same experience here. This is an intermittent problem. Usually, notifications arrive quickly. Sometimes, they don't. But not a big problem. I manually key in the security code when notifications don't arrive. Having said that, this is definitely an area IBKR team can look into and improve because it directly affects customer experience. If can't fix the problem, at least find out the cause.
I can confirm that I have had some slow notifications. I only wait for a few seconds before giving up and doing a manual authentication so I don't know how long the notification would have taken to get to me.
Are you guys using mobile networks or WiFi? I've found that I almost always get immediate notification on WiFi but on the mobile network (Verizon) I never get the notification. So when I'm on the mobile network like at work I have to do the manual authentication.
At least sometimes, I notice that the notification arrives even after I get tired of waiting and do the manual authentication. Which implies that the notification must have been sent before I did the manual authentication, but then got stuck somewhere.
I am usually on WiFi, but I have noticed the same behavior regardless of whether I am on WiFi or mobile network. I also noticed it this week in two locations 1000 miles apart.
Yes this happens to me about 50% of the time I resort to manual authentication. Sometimes I never get the notification.
Yep. It's affecting me too. Probably 95% of the time, it is fine. But on rare occasion, the notifications don't come (or come many minutes later.) To me, it seems like this problem started about a couple months ago. I reported it to IB Customer support. They told me that they had a problem with it on one particular day, but that it is now "fixed." Well, that's not true, because the problem occasionally still happens to me -- even after they claimed it was "fixed."
Potentially related (or not?): Ever since I created my account, many years ago -- I always got email notifications on any order fills. I never set up those notifications separately -- they just worked from the on-set of creating my account. At about the same time as the "IB Key" popup issue started to occasionally happen -- I also stopped receiving those automated email notifications for fills.
Since the "default alerts" stopped working, I now set up my own "custom alerts" in TWS to get those emails again. But now, whenever I start TWS, it will also open a separate "Alerts" dialog box that I have to close every time (and it prompts my confirmation for closing that box too) every time I start TWS. Kind of annoying.
Potentially related (or not?): Ever since I created my account, many years ago -- I always got email notifications on any order fills. I never set up those notifications separately -- they just worked from the on-set of creating my account. At about the same time as the "IB Key" popup issue started to occasionally happen -- I also stopped receiving those automated email notifications for fills.
Since the "default alerts" stopped working, I now set up my own "custom alerts" in TWS to get those emails again. But now, whenever I start TWS, it will also open a separate "Alerts" dialog box that I have to close every time (and it prompts my confirmation for closing that box too) every time I start TWS. Kind of annoying.