[2017-05-27] Coinbase suffers outages amid bitcoin surge

[tyz]

Coinbase suffers outages amid bitcoin surge

Coinbase said on Thursday it suffered outages this week as the bitcoin exchange saw "unprecedented traffic and trading," with the digital currency hitting record levels.

Bitcoin fell as much as 6.5 percent to $2,263.72 at around 1730 GMT on Thursday, but rebounded shortly after to hit a fresh all-time high of $2,760.10. Bitcoin hit a record on the BitStamp platform on Wednesday, driven by an uptick in demand for crypto-assets, with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin.

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/270517/coinbase-suffers-outages-amid-bitcoin-surge.html

[Nagadota]

Even the most regulated and legitimised exchanges have to have extremely suspiciously timed outages and potential scam attempts (e.g. BTC-E). 

Unless you're a whale who has legal power and has done extreme due diligence on the exact exchange, or you're a very good trader that makes the risk of being on these crazy exchanges during crazy price fluctuations worth it.

I'm sure Coinbase is pretty "safe" from actually taking your funds but any exchange can be pretty damn annoying and/or suspicious.

Personally I just take my Bitcoin off exchanges when the price goes too crazy.  It saves me from making poor trading decisions due to greed and emotions.

[1Referee]

I am sure that more people are signing up at various exchanges, but the more action there is on the market, the more people will be going nuts on the refresh button. If enough people within a very short period of time repeatedly hit refresh, the site will temporarily go down. Don't forget that exchanges have plenty of alts listed - people want to follow everything at the same time. Either way, this would be considered a 'normal' happening on mediocre exchanges, but not on a large and important service as that from Coinbase.

[Kemarit]

That's is why I'm believing that the infrastructure of most of the high end trading platform is not suited or doesn't anticipated this kind of volume and traffic coming in to their servers. They should have something like a Business Continuity Plan in place if such scenario happened. Right now, traders and investors might felt a little bit suspicious on the timing of the event, creating a atmosphere of being a scam site and losing trust amongst its customers. Again, they should mitigate risk and be ready for server upgrades if necessary to cope up with the surge of volumes and customers.

[richardsNY]

In most cases it all comes down to services trying to save costs everywhere possible. It's highly worrying as big money is involved in trading -- 1 second of the platform not working could possibly mean that traders lose out on thousands of dollars worth of profit. Imagine how that is when the platform is not accessible for several minutes straight.... It's unacceptable for any major exchange platform to experience such difficulties.

[TraderTimm]

"Hey Larry, we've got a bunch of orders to fill and Bitcoin is trading at new highs."

"Okay, tell you what -- just say we're under DDoS attack and hold on... I've got a feeling."

< Price Drops Like A Stone >

"Nice, now we can fill those orders at much lower prices!"

I trust Coinbase as much as I trust any centralized service.... which is to say, not at all...

[jamsproject]

I'll say it once and I'll say it again.

Trade somewhere else! Y'all should know better!

Aside from countless Issues they're having right now(Security Issues), Coinbase is meddling scum. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6hik6e/coinbase_disables_account_for_ross_ulbricht_legal/

Better off trading in good places like Paxful or anything equivalent.