Last updated on May 18th, 2024 at 12:11 pm
Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world reportedly crashes following a surge in traffic to the platform. This comes following an increase in Bitcoin trading activity today and a surge to $61k.
The outage has left users worried and speculations rising about the reliability of the platform. Reacting to this, Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong has issued a statement on X acknowledging the issue and stating that the team is looking into it.
Brian Armstrong cites traffic surge
He attributed the crash to a “large surge in traffic” exceeding the exchanges’ capacity. Many users had connectivity problems as a result of Coinbase’s servers being overloaded by the unexpected surge of users trying to purchase, sell, or exchange Bitcoin.
In addition, Coinbase issued an official statement on X (formerly Twitter) acknowledging and explaining the issue. “We are aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts & may experience errors in buying or selling. Our team is investigating this & will provide an update shortly,” Coinbase said.
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Furthermore, Coinbase assured users that their assets are safe and that activities will return to normal. The outage quickly impacted the price of Bitcoin as it sharply dropped from over $61k to $59,500.
However, at the time of writing, the asset has gradually reclaimed its loss as it is currently trading at $60,686. This is not the first time Coinbase has experienced a downtime amid periods of high market volatility.
In May 2020, the exchange experienced a downtime after Bitcoin’s price dropped by over 10% in about 30 mins. Also, in 2019, the exchange reportedly crashed after BTC dropped $1,800 in 15 minutes. This has raised questions from consumers to industry experts.
The incident serves as a reminder of the difficulties in running massive Bitcoin exchanges and the need for reliable infrastructure to provide continuous service for users.
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