Coinbase Recovers After (Another) Outage During Bitcoin Price fall
Coinbase suffered yet another outage on Thursday as cryptomarkets took a downward turn.
With operations in 32 countries, Coinbase is among the world’s largest and most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, enabling trading of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. However, the company wasn’t expecting, nor was prepared, for the surge in user traffic over the past three weeks amid significantly volatile markets.
A post-mortem forensic analysis of a major outage in late May – Coinbase pointed to ‘unprecedented traffic and trading volume’ at the time – hinted at a 10x growth in traffic.
“We are investing significant resources to make our systems scale with the next 10x growth in traffic,” stated Coinbase engineer Luke Demi in the technical post-mortem analysis published on Wednesday. .
That outage occurred when bitcoin hit a then all-time high of $2,750 before dropping $300 in a corrective fall. Earlier this week, Coinbase pointed to another ‘major outage’, soon after bitcoin prices struck a historic high of $3,000 before dropping over $400 on Monday. That trend continued today, as bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency market resembled a sea of red. Bitcoin price struck low of $2,050 on Coinbase today.
An update on the website’s status from Coinbase today read:
"We’re continuing to work towards a resolution of website load issues due to sustained heavy traffic on Coinbase.com. Thanks for your patience."
Both Coinbase’s website and its mobile application saw major outages.
