Dear Customers
as stated several times, our servers experience a growing traffic.
Several days ago we took the decision to migrate to a new network approach called clustering.
The whole setup took a while and during this time our traffic kept increasing exponentially.
Waiting for the market to stabilize before moving to the new system wouldn't make much sense as we don't know if the market will stabilize and when ( it might go like a yoyo for weeks ) and, as our traffic keeps increasing we need to take action.
Yesterday we had about 2 hours of maintenance during which we couldn't complete the migration.
Due to market instability we decided to resume trading, in order to avoid mayor losses.
Today we tried again and the downtime was longer, about 3 hours something if I'm correct (it seemed like a century to us ).
As the new system was experiencing some slowness, we decided to resume the old one and fine tune it a little more.
So here we are, tired and frustrated, but not tamed.
We now go to sleep (it's 1 a.m. EU time) and we will resume operations tomorrow.
Tomorrow we will probably experience some down time again (it is not certain but there is a possibility until the system has completely migrated).
My personal suggestion to all traders and to everyone that has a grain of salt in his head and is not completely blinded by greediness yet, is the following:
- As volatility is high and we might have some downtime do NOT take leveraged positions until the move has been completed.
The dangers in this moment outpace by far the rewards
Spend time with your family, go for a walk, do some sport or become an expert in long distance pumpkin seed spitting.
Not necessarily in this order.
We will probably have some downtime.
We will probably have some downtime.
We will probably have some downtime.
I hope this helps
We love you too, but sometimes you make it really hard
Have a good day
Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team
Hey Raphy
The amount of traffic has been growing, so it's natural that the amount of feature requests and complaints is growing too. That's only natural, but I understand that it can get tiresome/frustrating as well.
Nevertheless, I feel that I should point out that I get the feeling that you guys still underestimate the importance of communicating with the clients (something that seems to be common for every bitcoin exchange in existence). Communication should happen through multiple channels (
forum message, website message AND email) and sufficiently in advance (a week or so?), especially if the downtime is planned and not due to some DDOS. People that have margin positions open don't just suddenly want to be cut off from the market, it puts their funds in a lot of risk. You also can't expect every trader to check the forum every hour. If sudden downtimes like this, without proper communication happen more in the future, I think a lot of your clients will conclude Bitfinex is unreliable and leave, and I don't want this, because I like Bitfinex.
Maybe the traffic growth forced you to move quickly, and I appreciate the communication here in the thread, but please in the future :
1) signal downtimes in advance
2) try to be as accurate as possible about the start and finish of the downtime. (I realize its hard to predict the finish exactly, because complications can always occur, but "there are going to be some downtimes in the next few days" is really too vague for a trader to base his actions on)
3) Communicate the same message through multiple channels: forum, website & email.
PS: I appreciate the post explaining the Bitstamp issues.
