Bitcoin Exchange Coinbase Suffers ‘Major Outage’ Amid Trading Frenzy
Citing high customer traffic, prominent cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is currently down ‘for maintenance’.
San Francisco-based Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges with operations in over 30 countries is, at the time of publishing, experiencing an outage due to a surge in customer traffic hitting its website.
Users accessing the homepage see a message that simply reads “Service Unavailable”.
A closer look at the exchange’s real-time status page shows much of the damage coming from a rapid surge in customers trying to access the website. Coinbase’s own status for its website reads ‘Major Outage’ in red.
As of 11:02 PDT, Coinbase stated:
Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have receive a “service unavailable” message when visiting Coinbase.com. We appreciate your patience while our team actively works to resolve this issue.
The outage is also impacting mobile users, even though Coinbase’s status page shows its iOS and Android apps to be operational.
This is the second outage in less than a month for the exchange, which offers bitcoin, Ethereum and litecoin trading. In entirely similar circumstances on May 25, Coinbase pointed to an ‘unprecedented traffic and trading volume’ behind its outage at the time, when bitcoin rose to a (then) all-time high of $2,750 before losing $300. This time around, bitcoin struck an all-time high above $3,000 on Sunday, before seeing prices fall over $400 on Monday.
The outage has frustrated traders and cryptocurrency investors who were rightly quick to voice their displeasure.
https://twitter.com/SentineliAU/status/874329142300479490
https://twitter.com/Currenceej/status/874316177056681984
https://twitter.com/jtriest/status/874344722411786240
Featured image from Shutterstock.
