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.
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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