TD Ameritrade online trading system hit by outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online brokerage TD Ameritrade Holding Corp was hit on Tuesday by an outage in its Web-based trading system, but it was resolved shortly after noon, the company said.

Ameritrade said customers experiencing problems logging into accounts over the Internet could still access their accounts through the company's telephone system.

Telephone trades were charged at Web-based rates during the period of the outage, the company said.

A TD Ameritrade spokeswoman said the company saw a significant increase in activity through its call center and online about one hour after the market opened, and customers had difficulties logging into their accounts on its Web site.

The problems were resolved by early afternoon, she said.

Rival brokerage E*Trade Financial Corp also saw higher than normal customer activity on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Lilla Zuill and Ed Leefeldt; editing by Steve Orlofsky)