Now bitcoin is crashing along with the drop in technology stocks
Bitcoin topped $3,000 for the first time Sunday.
But the digital currency suddenly dropped Monday afternoon ET, erasing about $500 in value as multiple bitcoin exchanges reported problems.
Bitcoin remains more than 150 percent higher year to date.
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Bitcoin suddenly plummeted Monday, after jumping over the weekend to an all-time high.
The decline came as major U.S. technology stocks fell for a second straight day on concerns that the sector has risen to unsustainable levels.
At least two major bitcoin exchanges also had problems Monday.
"Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have receive(d) a 'service unavailable' message when visiting Coinbase.com," according to a statement on the exchange's status website dated June 12 at 2:08 p.m. ET.
The exchange accounts for nearly 17 percent of U.S. dollar-denominated bitcoin trade volume, according to Cryptocompare, and had reported outages in late May amid "unprecedented traffic and trading."
The BTC-E exchange tweeted at 2:06 p.m., ET, that it was hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS.
Bitcoin climbed above the psychologically key $3,000 level Sunday to hit a record high of $3,041.36, according to CoinDesk. The gains were helped by news that several major Chinese bitcoin exchanges were allowing withdrawals of the currency after a monthslong hiatus.
However, a sharp move lower Monday afternoon ET illustrated how volatile the cryptocurrency can be.
Bitcoin suddenly dropped more than 16 percent on the day to $2,532.87 before recovering slightly, CoinDesk data showed. The digital currency was last trading near $2,576.46.
Even with Monday's decline, bitcoin remained more than 150 percent higher for the year so far. The currency first topped the $2,000 level on May 20, less than four weeks ago.
