What was originally planned as a two-hour break for the popular Kraken cryptocurrency exchange became a multi-day odyssey and an emotional roller coaster for customers.
On January 10, Kraken announced that they would perform system updates that would disconnect all of their existing systems. However, no one expected an interruption of several days, since Kraken experienced many problems during its update process that lasted more than 48 hours.
One of the biggest problems with the situation was Kraken's lack of communication. Kraken remained incredibly quiet on his official Twitter account throughout the test, as he did not tweet once during the extended power outage. However, the Kraken status page was kept completely up-to-date, and consistently informed users of the progress of the update, including details as detailed as the way the developers were "occupying coffee".
That, of course, did not prevent the media wave from expressing doubts about the situation, causing widespread panic, as many began to believe that it was possibly a piracy situation. The space of the cryptocurrency is no stranger to the exchange of hacks, taking into account that millions have been lost in the past between Mt. Gox incident in 2013, Bit Stamp hack in 2015, and even the Bitfinex trick in 2016.
Call and answer
Although the users took the social networks to express their outrage, the Kraken employee, Max Kaplan, took the stand to give them some clarity and said: "Kraken has never been pirated and still remains upset." He also acknowledged that the team "dropped the ball on the upgrade", but assured the clients that their properties were still safe.
One of the state updates on January 12, Kraken acknowledged these failures: "Yes, this is our new record of downtime since we launched in 2013. No, we're not proud of that."
Fortunately, this terrible experience has come to an end with a recent update published a few hours ago by the Kraken team.
To the relief of customers, Kraken reopened its doors today and announced free trade until the end of the month. According to the update, Kraken's downtime was due to a replacement of its legacy trading engine, and problems that came with the migration. He also announced the publication of a blog in the coming days that will provide more details on the interruption of service, along with plans to improve the customer experience on the platform.
Although the situation of the Kraken turned out to be a false alarm, this could keep the operators of newer cryptocurrencies a bit captive when it comes to centralized exchanges taking into account the general tracking records.