"Connection lost" and the red bar at the bottom corner

[Shadow Trader]

The status bar in MetaTrader shows a connection indicator. Green bars mean fine. The first sign of trouble is the pattern: a few bars drop, quotes slow, and a message appears.

A brief disconnect isn't always the internet. It can be the broker's server restarting a service, a load balancer redirecting connections, or a platform that timed out waiting for a heartbeat. During busy moments, brokers' servers drop connections to rebalance load.

On reconnection, the platform may replay missed ticks or skip them. Chart data may have holes. Pending orders may have triggered or not, depending on what the server did while the client was away.

Habits that help: after any reconnect, check open positions, pending orders, and the order history immediately, rather than assuming the state is unchanged. Don't click the same order again until confirmed it hasn't gone through.

A log of disconnect times, kept for a month, often shows a pattern, perhaps every day at the same hour, which can be shown to the broker's support team.

At what time of day do disconnects most often appear on your terminal?