‘Unprecedented’ Bitcoin Boom Sees Coinbase, Kraken Suffer Outages

[Betamog]

Major bitcoin exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are suffering downtime in a week when bitcoin prices are soaring to all-time highs.

While bitcoin surged to an all-time high of $2,740 on Bitstamp before losing $300 in returning to Wednesday’s heights, the heightened interest and subsequent demand for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency is proving too much to bear for a number of bitcoin companies.

Coinbase, a San Francisco-based exchange that offers bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin trading, was brought to its knees on Thursday, citing ‘unprecedented traffic and trading volume.

A statement released by the exchange read:

"Coinbase has experienced unprecedented traffic and trading volume this week. As a result, Coinbase.com has suffered a few outages and downgraded performance for some users this week. Our engineering and support teams are working around the clock to restore our site to normal performance."

Kraken, also a US-based exchange which fuels over 60% of bitcoin trading in European markets, points to ‘degraded performance’ to its website and API. Kraken is seeing “all-time record traffic”, the trading platform revealed.

Identifying the issue for its current woes, Kraken stated:

"The website and API are currently slow or unresponsive for many clients. We are working to resolve but do not have an ETA for when things may return to normal at this time. We are currently seeing all-time record traffic and performance may not return to normal until the load goes down."

Both exchanges contribute significantly to enable trading volumes in the US – the world’s largest bitcoin trading market. Coinbase, in particular, is second only to Bitfinex over the last 24 hours. However, today’s downtimes aren’t exclusive to the biggest bitcoin markets.

India, a young but growing bitcoin market with relatively modest trading volumes, has also witnessed massive interest in the cryptocurrency. Coinsecure, one of India’s top three bitcoin exchanges, pointed to the “exponential growth” of bitcoin users on its platform this week, leading to deposit and withdrawal delays. Zebpay, another major Indian wallet and exchange, reached half a million downloads of its mobile Android application this week and claimed to be adding 2,500 new users every day to its platform.

At its all-time high today, bitcoin had grown 174% since the turn of the year.

[Yakamoto]

Is this potentially the reason behind the flash crash that we experienced earlier today? It might have been a correction but by the sounds of it this might have been something that triggered the entire event.

It's not surprising if they had been experiencing record volume because the value was poised to be up +$100 from the start of the day, and the bull market isn't slowing down, so there might have been a lot of people seeking to get into the market sooner rather than later so that they don't miss out on the happenings.

[chennan]

Is this potentially the reason behind the flash crash that we experienced earlier today? It might have been a correction but by the sounds of it this might have been something that triggered the entire event.

It's not surprising if they had been experiencing record volume because the value was poised to be up +$100 from the start of the day, and the bull market isn't slowing down, so there might have been a lot of people seeking to get into the market sooner rather than later so that they don't miss out on the happenings.

There had to be a correction at some point in time.  The only particular thing that makes me think that this "flash crash" happened was just primarily due to the nature of FOMO.  When people are acting irrationally with their money, as well as suggesting that everyone you know such as your coworkers, mom, grandma and the dog to get their money into Bitcoin; you start seeing irrational things happen.  Even the slightest bit of hiccup in just the rate of increase alone can spook people and get them to start selling and selling EVERYTHING very quickly.

It's a very slippery slope when you start dealing with this kind of volume of cash flow into Bitcoin... it becomes a sort of inorganic growth.

[Cryptolator]

Kraken is always slow, it's a real shame, they should invest a bit on the server / bandwidht side. But today, it's a real joke, I had error over error loading pages and they took forever. I certainly hope they'll fix that.

[iluvpie60]

The unprecedented thing is kind of a joke though, in looking at volumes at other exchanges they didnt crash from the traffic that I saw.

First of all coinbase uses AWS so they should be able to scale up as more traffic comes in. At a certain point it comes down to their app just being laggy. Even when traffic is average it seems their app isnt instant and takes a second or two to switch between prices. Just something I noticed


That being said, probably just people dumping to get some profit, price going back up now. Unless another Gox happens, we are in for slow price increases each day. Demand is higher while supply is shrinking

[aso118]

Ha ha... This is surprising. Coinbase and Kraken are among the larger exchanges and I thought they would be better prepared.
If large global exchanges suffer, think what will happen to smaller, isolated exchanges in countries where there is high demand for bitcoins? 

[amacar2]

You can add poloniex also on the list, Poloniex got lags more than three times in 10 days period when XRP was pumping hard. They have also released statement claiming that they have seen exponential growth in userbase and daily traffic in last few days. I used to get really surprised when I see such a high ranked trading platforms can't handle even 1,00,000 users at a time. They should invest atleast some of their profit in maintaining and upgrading their servers.

[pooya87]

You can add poloniex also on the list, Poloniex got lags more than three times in 10 days period when XRP was pumping hard. They have also released statement claiming that they have seen exponential growth in userbase and daily traffic in last few days. I used to get really surprised when I see such a high ranked trading platforms can't handle even 1,00,000 users at a time. They should invest atleast some of their profit in maintaining and upgrading their servers.

polo is always like this!
for bitcoin exchanges at least we can say this is somewhat new since the 2K territory is new and has never occurred before so it is attracting a lot of users to these sites. but altcoins are unknown outside of bitcoin community, so the user base is also the same and it always increases the same. and polo always goes down at times like this every couple of months

[smartbitcoininvestor]

Stay safe and use a cold wallet. It is a good time to keep security in mind and also maybe consider diversifying while prices are up. 

[Amph]

Kraken is always slow, it's a real shame, they should invest a bit on the server / bandwidht side. But today, it's a real joke, I had error over error loading pages and they took forever. I certainly hope they'll fix that.

not always for me just yesterday after the big increase, they do't increase the server just because for one slow down, they need to know for sure that their current capacity isn't enough

increasing servers isn't cheap, but we their huge volume(kraken is second in volume now) there should be not any issue to do it

Stay safe and use a cold wallet. It is a good time to keep security in mind and also maybe consider diversifying while prices are up. 

this has nothing to do with the slow down of the exchange, we are not talking about security here, besides kraken was never hacked, i hold there something for fast selling and never add any trouble

[davis196]

Is this potentially the reason behind the flash crash that we experienced earlier today? It might have been a correction but by the sounds of it this might have been something that triggered the entire event.

It's not surprising if they had been experiencing record volume because the value was poised to be up +$100 from the start of the day, and the bull market isn't slowing down, so there might have been a lot of people seeking to get into the market sooner rather than later so that they don't miss out on the happenings.

The speculation bubble is going to burst.
OP you don`t have to copy paste other peoples articles in threads
just to boost your post count.

[Xester]

That is not very shocking and that is something we can expect because of the too much demand and traffic volume. If we look at the charts we will see that from 2200$ the price even went up fast to 2740$ and above 3000$. If the demand did not stop both bitcoin companies system will crush and it is just right that bitcoin melted down to 2200$ early this morning.

[JL421]

This is all because of those hackers and we can't really blame them for using bitcoin as it is non traceable , because of this many news and social media started researching and this quote also went viral "If you invested 100$ in bitcoin in 2009 , you would have $72 million now". Maybe this is the reason for all this crase and literally coinbase was down whole day

[posternat]

Ha ha... This is surprising. Coinbase and Kraken are among the larger exchanges and I thought they would be better prepared.
If large global exchanges suffer, think what will happen to smaller, isolated exchanges in countries where there is high demand for bitcoins? 

Really annoying and surprising to see such big exchanges cant handle such high traffic, and we are talking about to make bitcoin the only currency worldwide. What will happen to these exchanges then ? 
I think its time these exchanges should be ready for such high trades and traffic and upgrade their servers so accommodate more people and traffic.

[BitcoinPC]

Ha ha... This is surprising. Coinbase and Kraken are among the larger exchanges and I thought they would be better prepared.
If large global exchanges suffer, think what will happen to smaller, isolated exchanges in countries where there is high demand for bitcoins? 

Really annoying and surprising to see such big exchanges cant handle such high traffic, and we are talking about to make bitcoin the only currency worldwide. What will happen to these exchanges then ? 
I think its time these exchanges should be ready for such high trades and traffic and upgrade their servers so accommodate more people and traffic.

Too bad to see this. I have to make some important transactions through coinbase and every time i go on their site for last two days, it showed site is in maintenance. Sites like these should have a good backup plan as downtime in such sites means people can lose a lots of their coins without being able to trade / spend / buy /sell at a critical time.