Bitcoin Forum

https://www.coincurb.com/news/bitcoin-break-to-8000-broke-coinbase-which-experienced-partial-outage-again/

It seems that Coinbase has been dealing with this issue for years now and it's quite surprising to see the platform hasn't been able to fix it. Is there a possibility for the exchange to be allowing or conducting these outages on purpose?

Right now Coinbase is live and running.I don't think that they've done this on purpose.
Perhaps there were too many orders on the exchange that caused the platform to crash,I'm not an expert.
Companies like Coinbase usually have more benefits from a bull situation on the crypto markets-more newbies buying Bitcoins,more revenue from fees.It doesn't make sense for them to cause a Bitcoin price crash and a bearish trend.They aren't the biggest crypto exchange in the world,so a possible outage can't influence the Bitcoin price.

Whenever there is a big pump or dump in bitcoin prices, the coinbase crashes. Maybe because they are not able to handle the increased number of people accessing the site. They shoud upgrade their system. I don't see any other motive for coin base to purposely down their system.

They are not causing a Bitcoin crash. The point is that they might be going down on purpose during periods of high volatility to sell/buy before anyone else on their exchange and benefit from that, of course, this is just a hypothesis.


Sure, however, they had this problem since 2017 and it seems they haven't been able to solve it, what does that say about a 'professional exchange' ?

Theoretically possible for whatever agenda, but I don't think it is. In my opinion, intentional outages for whatever agenda is a lot more likely to happen when talking about leverage trading exchanges like BitMEX as outages can wreck out people's shorts/longs when huge price movements occur. Why would they do it? Idunno.

Coinbase Pro has gradually grown to lead the price action at times. That's going to put a strain on any company's operations. Bitfinex has been the leader in the past and they had the same crapping out in intense moments too.

An exchange going down at peak moments loses them plenty of money in fees. I can't see them doing it on purpose and there have been more lucrative and pivotal times to do it on purpose if that was some sort of policy.

Well, they might be losing money in fees but if they are involved in some sort of scheme to buy/sell before anyone else, I'm sure they would make a lot more money. If it's not on purpose, then it's a shit exchange that hasn't  been able to solve this issue in 3+ years.

That is conceivable. I'd be dead surprised if Bitmex and Bitfinex weren't doing something like that. Coinbase though has some prestigious investors and if that were ever proven that wouldn't do their rep much good just as they're trying to position themselves as a legitimate player in finance.

There was the Coinbase BCH launch to draw on which was an absolute shitshow. Luckily Coinbase conducted an 'internal investigation' and surprisingly found that that no wrongs had occurred.

I've no idea of the strains heavy movement makes on exchanges but it's not an easy thing to deal with. Kraken failed and froze constantly for years until they completely rebuilt their back end if I remember rightly.

I think that a crypto exchange like Coinbase can afford to have things like this happen to them because they are dominant in the market and regardless of events like this, their clients don't have too many choices other than complaining on social media. It is more than obvious that something is wrong here, and whether it is just a matter of technical problems caused by a large server load or something else.

There are a lot of dissatisfied users on their Twitter...

https://i.imgur.com/H7KA2pv.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Aknuraz.jpg
https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1258816770837590017

I have noticed it also but I doubt they were doing it on purpose too, since we are having a massive speculation on the cryptocurrency market I guess they are experiencing some heavy traffic on their platform even more these days that coinbase and binance are the best performing exchanges. But if it turns out to be true that they were doing it on purpose, then clearly are manipulating the price of bitcoin avoiding it not to lose value because of the dump. But then again Coinbase is huge enough to put their reputation in expense.

exchanges' servers crash on both sudden rises and sudden falls. it is for a wide variety of reasons including the sudden surge of users trying to buy and sell their coins in both cases and sometimes there is an addition of a DDoS attack on their servers from someone who loses money and is butthurt and doesn't want to see the price go up for example.
in any case their horrible servers is the least of our worries when it  comes to centralized exchanges.

anyway,since 2017 they found this problem, 3 years ago,this problem has always existed.
I think this is one of the many unstable factors in the cryptocurrency market. There are many factors like this, and it is easy to cause the market price to up or down. For ordinary traders, it is really too uncomfortable.

I don't think they are coincidentally doing that during the crash. Perhaps, they are doing some upgrade or maintain their website so they can run properly. But if they do that for some purposes, I think people will know, and they will choose what they need to do. Coinbase itself will try to fix the problem as soon as possible, and I am sure that they don't want to see their customer disappointed with that experience.

But we don't know what the truth about that is, and we can only guess. But we hope that Coinbase will be fine like before so you can use Coinbase as what you want.

Coinbase has been a great exchange that has proven to be secured and customer centric over the years, I believe what happened was occasioned by sudden market fluctuation and not intentional.

Exactly. They quite blatantly froze their exchange and stopped customers from trading so they themselves could make some nice profit first before dumping the losses on their users. It isn't exactly inconceivable that they would do pretty much the same thing during big price movements. The fact is this is now a recurring theme with Coinbase - literally every time the price moves by more than a few hundred dollars quickly, they crash. You would think a company with revenues of over $2 billion would be able to fix a simple server overload.

Still, this is what you sign up for when you use centralized exchanges. You don't own the coins you store on a centralized exchange. The exchange owns them, and they grant you access to them. If the exchange says "you can't access them right now", then there is nothing you can do about it.

You are kidding yourself if you think Coinbase care at all about customer satisfaction. They care about you giving them your money. That's all.

"Customer centric"? Lol. They sold customers' data to third parties without their knowledge.

I'm not sure Coinbase has done this on purpose. I think it was the mass of people trying to access the exchange all at once that caused it to crush. Given that BTC has dropped by ~ $1k people must have got really worried and tried to pull all their funds

Coinbase is fine to store 🏬 cash 💵. Thats about it.

They are subject to us fdic rules for cash 💵.

I always have a few bucks cash in it.

What most people don’t realize about every exhange is they never could cash every btc out that they say they have.

So when a run on btc happens they shut up shop for a while.

A run on btc happened as there was a big cash out. They don’t have the btc on hand to cash out.

So they shut down.

All exchanges do this.

Not only that exchange even our local exchange always have a problem converting in fiat currency every time there are big change in prices or sudden  dump.

Maybe that exchange doesn't want to lose in trade that's why they always decided to lock or make it hard to convert every time there is a big movement for bitcoin.

This whole dump was orchestrated to wreck longs. There were some comments on trading channels where people who do this for a living couldn't even set a position in time before it was all over. One guy said he went away for a few minutes to make some tea and when he was back it was all over. It doesn't happen that fast unless it's set by bots or the exchanges itself.
That's why I stay away from trading. This game is rigged.

Even if it's not and Coinbase has nothing to do with it, it's ridiculous that such a big exchange still has this problem after years. Why would anyone trade there if it goes down every time there is some volatility? Bitcoin is VOLATILITY, the exchange is basically going to be down 50% of the time.

It's the same with our local exchange, being down when there's a huge opportunity to take. I don't want to be pessimistic but it always happen so maybe some exchanges are doing it in purpose. Business will be always a business, it will never change and will always take the maximum of that opportunity than its users. People can't do anything about it so better choose other exchanges that don't crash when changes happening in market.

Name recognition and resistance to change. They are one of the largest and most well known exchanges, and so a lot of people will pick them as their first exchange without doing that much research. Once you've gone through the effort of creating a new account, enabling 2FA, completing all the ridiculous KYC, scanning your documents, answering their questions, waiting days or weeks to become verified, linking to your bank account or credit cards, etc., then a lot of people will opt to put up with sub-optimal conditions rather than switching to a new provider. Certainly if you are concerned about your KYC documents (as everyone should be), then once you've completed KYC at one exchange you are going to be in no hurry to complete it any more.

The fact they keeping "crashing" when the bitcoin price moves is only a tiny propotion of all the shady or objectionable things Coinbase have done over the years, from spamming the network with non-batched transactions for years and listing trash coins their investors wanted to dump on their users, all the way through to partnering with a company who produce and sell surveillance technology to human rights abusing dictators.

probably because of congestion and traffic overload. It is bitcoin season and even people who know little about crypto will come in to buy and this might be the reason. coinbase will make alot of money from fee so I do not see reason why they will intentionally do this. Even the CZ binance also make mention about getting binance server prepared when a whale alert was received. you can check his twitter handle for this.

https://i.ibb.co/sC6LpqJ/Screen-Shot-2020-05-11-at-5-25-25-AM.png (https://ibb.co/DY83PQg)

They have a history of crashes when BTC goes down or up, but by this time, they should have adjust their servers to the volume. But why is it still happening? probably it is being rig by someone inside and they don't want people buying the dip, LOL.

Be careful. This may be fake coinbase sate you login.

Exactly, it's not like it's a surprise either, Bitcoin will do 5-10% moves in minutes, that's how it is and everyone knows it. If you can't fix that after 3 years, then you are either incompetent or doing it on purpose.

I find it interesting that the couple exchanges I'm close with have presented a huge influx of new users. Compared to last month at least, seems that these last couple of days people have been registering en masse. It's possible coinbase saw a similar behavior and wasn't prepared for it, heck, it's funny to type that out. "Coinbase wasnt prepared for it"

Coinbase really should have contingencies by now for this kind of problem.
Considering the huge amount they are dealing everyday, they should have anticipated that this will happen again and again.
And should have looked a sustainable solution to address this problem.
What will be the impression of their clients if this will continue to happen in the future?

Coin base has 5.6 million users , in January 2018 it had 11.1 million users .
Now the site is incapable of handling high amount of users at once. One needs to understand that at times like this where one can expect high amount of traffic the website needs to be upgraded to support it . Plus everyone knew halving is a historic event and therefore it should have been done before.
The downtime on the websites does cost them themselves therefore making it even worse for most websites , so if coin base would do this on purpose the chances are they are loosing a good amount of money too.
But if they were paid correctly by some big whale to do that then the chances are they did not upgrade their website and what they were paid was Preety big amount.
See it is a decentralized network but still it does not stop people from playing dirty.
But at the same time I do doubt that coinbase would actually repeat their mistakes again and again . After 2018 they should have already upgraded the site plus prevented the clustering of users so that they can all use the website efficiently.
I think my take on it would be :
They are doing it on purpose.
But then again what they are doing is not against any rules. Therefore there cannot be any action taken against them , even if people go to the court they would be advised to just leave and use another exchange.

Completely insignificant. If Coinbase goes down for an hour now and then, there are still 8,700+ other hours in the year for them to earn profit. The amount of money they lose from being down for an hour is utterly insignificant to their $2 billion a year turnover. It will also pale in comparison to the amount of money they can make by insider trading and dumping on their customers while their exchange is "down", if that is indeed what they are doing. Further, the majority of people who are storing their money on Coinbase and want to trade when the price starts moving rapidly are still going to want to trade when the exchange comes back up.

A decentralized network, but a centralized exchange. When you use a centralized exchange you play by their rules and there is nothing you can do about it.

It took them how many years to support SegWit? It took them how many years to finally batch their transactions? If this is indeed unintentional, then it will continue to happen for years before they finally get it fixed.

Insider trading is absolutely against the law. As gentlemand pointed out above, luckily Coinbase found themselves innocent in their own investigation in to themselves. ::)

Coinbase exchanges don't do this on purpose, because it is not profitable for coinbase to do so. The existing coinbase reputation can be bad
if they do that, in my opinion this is just a technical problem. Coinbase should upgrade their system immediately. If the system is not fixed
immediately, the coinbase can be left by its users. Because now many exchanges that offer good service and of course with a good system
as well, so make users comfortable.

When similar spikes in trading activity do not cause the same result it would appear to be due to foul play on the part of coin base but big surges do happen.

If this was the case, delaying  a major exchanges user base from selling gives them a large advantage to liquidate assets prior to

Until the ubiquitous smoking gun arrives the conspiracy theories will live on!

Happy halving! BTC

Mainwhile I've checked coinbase and right now it seems everything is fine. Running good. I have been using coinbase since 5 years. I notice not only coinbase but also others exchanges crashe when there is a big increase or decrease of bitcoin price. Maybe because of their hosting unable to control a lots of traffic during that incidents. So don't think coinbase has done this outages on purpose

Still, any exchange should never crash whenever there's an influx of users trying to trade on their platform. Being paranoid is not good but you should not trust them too much. We don't know what's happening under the hood after all. On top of that, it's perfectly understandable if people start throwing accusations when the same thing happened multiple times without any real fix (at least a fix people can enjoy).

I also noticed that coinbase during the dumps and pumps crashed the system, initially I thought it was done on purpose by coinbase itself, but in my opinion btc every day finds new investors and with the increase of users who place orders during the pumps or dump leads to a blockage of the system APIs. personal opinion of course

I doubt they're doing so on purpose most especially as they stand to benefit more each time there's an increase numbers of traffic on their site as a result of either people selling or buying bitcoin in their numbers. The funds this traffic will generate as a result of fees charge by the exchange is just something an exchange like coinbase won't want to miss.

And assuming this is discovered to be a foul play by the exchange, it will definitely ruins their reputation which I'm quite sure coinbase won't want to risk that happening. A big exchange like coinbase though should have been able to tackle this issue but don't get why that's not the case.

Issue like this experience repeatedly by other so called reputed top exchanges is why we have to give credit to Binance for been ahead of the games. Assuming such issue was experience by Binance, they would had done sometime immediately to prevent the site from experiencing similar issues.

I don't think this issue is only about Coinbase. All major exchanges, including Binance, experience similar problems after the frequency of orders entered and canceled during sudden price movements.

I do not really think it it Coinbase causing there own exchange to go down in peak hours because the fee loss and bad look it gives them.
Unless you think they are doing big shorts and manipulating the price but I doubt that.

I would say its more likely that other 3rd party people with the means to put more strain on Coinbase when they want to make it drop are doing it.

But they should have already find the solution for this problem as it was not the first time to happen. When it first happened, they should have identified the solution or were they confident about their system? If it will happen again in the future, I don't think it will be good on their image.

Have you tried Swapzone?

It's a perfectly good explanation that Coinbase is not being able to handle the number of transactions people are making during sudden price changes, and this triggers the outage events. Perhaps that's not it, and Coinbase is doing it on purpose, but I don't see why it would (if the price is going down, one might think they don't want to lose money people entrust them with, but if the price is going up, it just makes no sense). And we don't see the whole picture. Maybe making sure that the outages don't occur is too expensive or risky in some ways, so Coinbase chooses not to do anything.

I am not an expert nor a Good in exchange operation but this same issue comes in our local exchange everytime the Market experienced Big changes.

Just like recently that they announced a maintenance in May 11 but since the market moves Up in May 9 they suddenly declared emergency maintenance.

This happens many times before specially when there is a Bullrun happening and very rare when Bearish comes ,i don't know whats happening but for me?there is something that they intentionally prevent people to trade in a certain period of time.

After reading this news, i moved my coins from coin base to my personal wallet. I did not say that coinbase can scam but we should be careful. Although there are certain times where coin base goes down due to maintenance or outages but it always come back online. Just to be on the safe side, remove your extra funds from online exchanges.

Here's a post from a Coinbase engineer about the outage - https://blog.coinbase.com/incident-post-mortem-april-29-and-may-9-2020-56494decab9f

It sounds like a system that wasn't used all that often did not do the job when called upon. Looks like they're going to fiddle and improve it.

I think they don't want their servers crashed. Also, big influx of buyers/sellers just is more headache to them.

Once again, Coinbase got down. This time it was caused by Ripple price growth.

First noticed it on twitter (https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/1331149507212439553) few hours ago. But now Coinbase seems to be working again. They must do something with their servers. Either update them or change their IT support team, because every time top altcoins and bitcoin start they fly to the moon, Coinbase servers crashes...

Rather, they've been making a lot of mistakes lately. That's their main problem.