Is Rithmic Down, or Is It Your Connection?

When a Rithmic connection fails, the first question is not how to fix it. It is whether there is anything to fix. Rithmic has a fixed weekly downtime, and a good share of the panic around dropped connections happens inside a window where nothing was wrong.

The weekly schedule

Rithmic closes after the futures close on Friday, at roughly 5pm Eastern, and returns on Sunday evening when markets reopen, at roughly 6pm Eastern. Routine system maintenance runs across that gap, generally from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon Central time.

If your connection is refusing to come up on a Saturday, that is the answer. Nothing is broken, your credentials are fine, and rebuilding the connection will not help. The same applies to a Sunday afternoon attempt made before the gateways are back.

Telling a real outage from your own setup

Outside that window, the useful question is whether the fault sits upstream of you or inside your own environment. There is a straightforward test.

If every firm fails at once, it is upstream. Rithmic runs the gateway for a large share of prop firms, so a genuine provider problem takes down all of your Rithmic connections together. Nothing you change locally will help and the fix is to wait.

If one firm fails while others hold, it is that firm or that login. That points at credentials, the System entry, a session limit, or an authorisation issue at the firm rather than anything to do with Rithmic itself.

If everything fails including things unrelated to trading, it is your connection. Check whether other sites load before you touch NinjaTrader at all.

Why this is harder than it should be

The obstacle is that NinjaTrader does not present this well. A single status area, one firm at a time, no history. If a connection dropped forty minutes ago and recovered, there is nothing left on screen to tell you it happened, which means the same question comes round again the next time and you are guessing from memory.

Two things make the diagnosis quick. The first is watching every connection at once, so the all-firms-versus-one-firm test can be read at a glance rather than assembled by clicking through connections. The second is keeping a timestamped history of drops, so that when you ask whether Rithmic was down at 9.42 this morning you have an answer rather than an impression.

That is what the health window in Unlimited Prop Firm Connections does, including seven days of drop history and a record of what you were holding at the time.

Before you contact your firm

If you have established it is not a maintenance window and not every firm at once, gather two details before you open a ticket: the exact time of the drop and the exact wording of any error. Support conversations that begin with a timestamp resolve considerably faster than ones that begin with a description.

Affordable Indicators, Inc. is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rithmic, NinjaTrader, or any prop firm or broker named here; your firm’s and broker’s own terms govern how you may use your account, so check with them first.