U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase experienced technical issues on Tuesday for a few hours as Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of $69,000. On Wednesday Asia time Bitcoin was trading down 7% at $63,000.
In response to these issues, Coinbase continued to update and reassure its users throughout the recent outage: “We are aware that some users may be experiencing errors when transacting. Our team is investigating this issue and will provide an update shortly. Your assets are safe.”
“We are aware some users may experience increased latency across Coinbase.com and a few users may see intermittent zero balance. Rest assured, your funds are safe. Our team is investigating this issue and will provide an update. Trading is not impacted at this time.”
Many exchange users expressed despair and frustration on the social media platform X as Bitcoin caused a trading frenzy in the market. Many speculated the coinbase outage could be “flash crash” which occurs when the value of a market drops significantly in electronic trading over a short time period.
Customer transactions have fully recovered, we will continue to monitor activity. Advanced Trade API users may continue to see increased throttling while we experience increased trade volume. https://t.co/dOWxljnSvX
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) March 5, 2024
Coinbase Faces Technical Glitches Amid Market Surge
This isn’t the first time Coinbase has encountered such problems. Earlier this week there was a glitch and the platform experienced similar issues due to a surge in traffic.
This recent surge in market activity and bullish sentiment has strained Coinbase’s infrastructure, resulting in intermittent technical issues. Increased outages were reported in the last 24 hours, likely due to traders and investors flocking to the platform to capitalize on the positive market momentum. This influx of users may have overwhelmed the exchange’s servers, leading to latency and zero-balance issues for some users.
Apps are now recovering.
We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load tested it. This exceeded that number.
It’s expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we’ll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions, and killing any remaining bottlenecks. Thank you for… https://t.co/JXVppV57AF
— Brian Armstrong 🛡️ (@brian_armstrong) February 28, 2024