Binance and Coinbase, two of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, experienced technical issues in the past few hours, and users were unable to log in. The problems coincided with bitcoin breaking into uncharted territory above $20,000 for the first time.
As CryptoPotato reported earlier today, the primary cryptocurrency finally broke above $20,000. Bitcoin didn’t stop there and continued to a new all-time high level of $20,800.
As it typically happens, BTC dragged most alternative coins with it. As a result, the entire cryptocurrency market capitalization expanded by nearly $40 billion in a matter of hours.
However, these highly-volatile developments caused issues on the large US-based crypto exchange Coinbase and the leading trading platform – Binance.
The Malta-based platform said, “some users may be experiencing issues when trying to access the site or the mobile app.” The company’s security team worked on resolving the issue, as the CEO Changpeng Zhao informed.
According to CZ, the platform’s issues came from scaling, as when BTC went up by 5%, the traffic skyrocketed 30x. Although he initially said that the problems were solved, he admitted that there may still be some “latency issues here and there.”
Coinbase also acknowledged that it had troubles with the connection. The US exchange updated the status to “currently investigating the issue,” and numerous company clients have continued to report issues on Twitter.
Unfortunately for Coinbase, this is far from the first similar case. Earlier this year, the exchange went offline when bitcoin plummeted from $10,000 to $8,000 in a few hours. Interestingly, the company explained that it had experienced connectivity issues again.
About a month later, the events repeated when BTC surged to above $10,000. This time, the company reacted by implementing a “number of improvements” to avoid such incidents. Those included fixing the “health endpoint” and reducing the impact of price-related traffic spikes through pre-scaling and caching.
However, it seems that the improvements didn’t work today as traders were left out of the exchange. This is a growing concern for investors, as they expect to rely on their preferred trading venues in times of high volatility.