# Alpaca Paper Account Positions Wiped

**URL:** <https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/alpaca-paper-account-positions-wiped/19225>\
**Category:** Alpaca Account Troubleshooting\
**Created:** [July 7, 2026, 2:53pm UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/alpaca-paper-account-positions-wiped/19225 "2026-07-07T14:53:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![goos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/87869e/32.png) [@goos](https://forum.alpaca.markets/u/goos)\
**Post date:** [July 7, 2026, 9:27pm UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/alpaca-paper-account-positions-wiped/19225/22 "2026-07-07T21:27:49Z")

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We hit this twice today (July 7) across three paper accounts, and we have fairly precise observations that might help Alpaca narrow it down.

Symptoms:  
`GET /v2/positions` returned an empty (or partially rolled-back) list, and `GET /v2/account` reported `portfolio_value` collapsed to roughly cash–i.e. the account was being valued as if the positions didn’t exist. Cash was untouched throughout, and `GET /v2/account/activities` showed no activity records of any kind corresponding to the disappearances–no fills, no liquidations, no journals. The positions later reappeared on their own, intact, both times.

Time windows (UTC, July 7 2026):

- ~14:10 – ~16:00 — all three accounts affected simultaneously. Positions API returned `[]`, `portfolio_value` == cash to the cent. It recovered on its own by ~16:30.
- ~20:15 – ~21:00 — hit again. This time the rollback was partial: positions opened that same day were still returned, while everything older was missing. So the positions looked “rolled back and replayed with only today’s activity.”

It kind of looked like a read-layer / replica issue rather than lost state for a few reasons:

1. Dashboard vs API divergence: During the second window, the web dashboard showed all positions correctly while the trading API (same account, same time) returned the rolled-back book. Same account, two different answers depending on which surface we looked at.
2. Per-account flapping within seconds. At 20:30 (± a few seconds), one of our accounts read as fully empty while another still returned exactly one position (that day’s buy)–consistent with requests landing on differently-stale replicas.
3. A phantom short from a fill applied against the vanished book. One account received a sell of 9 shares of a ticker at 18:43 UTC (position existed and the fill is in the activities log). During the second window, `/v2/positions` showed that ticker at `−9`–the sell applied on top of the rolled-back (empty) book. When the state recovered at ~21:00, the ticker correctly netted to zero. So whatever serves `/v2/positions` was applying recent fills onto a stale snapshot.

Verified with raw HTTP calls (no SDK) to paper-api.alpaca.markets, so this doesn’t look like client-side caching.

The state appears to survive server-side–both windows self-recovered with everything intact, including correct netting of trades made during the outage. I’d hold off on resetting accounts; you’d likely lose your history for a problem that looks fixable. The bigger operational risk is anything automated reading the empty book as truth.

For Alpaca folks: we’re happy to provide exact request timestamps, account IDs, and our full observation logs if need be.

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**Author:** ![Jake\_elavat](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.alpaca.markets/jake_elavat/32/8475_2.png) [@Jake\_elavat](https://forum.alpaca.markets/u/Jake_elavat)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2026, 2:32pm UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/alpaca-paper-account-positions-wiped/19225/23 "2026-07-08T14:32:19Z")

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The bug is forgivable; the handling is the concern: Paper accounts exist so trading systems can be validated against the live platform’s behavior — ours is a fully automated system scheduled to go live in a few months, and this event executed real (simulated) orders into an emptied account and cost a full day of forensics and repair. Respectfully, we’d like an official acknowledgment with root cause, a commitment that paper-platform incidents appear on the status page like any other incident, and guidance on what account state is authoritative after a restore. Incident communication is part of broker due diligence — the silence says more than the bug did.

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