Bitcoin surges, exchanges run hot, and Coinbase glitches—lather, rinse, repeat. Following widespread reports that Coinbase users were logging in to see zero balances in their wallets, CEO Brian Armstrong said Wednesday afternoon that the problem had been fixed.
“We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load tested it,” Armstrong said on Twitter. “This exceeded that number.
“It’s expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we’ll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions and killing any remaining bottlenecks,” he continued. “Thank you for bearing with us.”
We are aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts & may experience errors in buying or selling. Our team is investigating this & will provide an update shortly. Your assets are safe.
You can track this incident at https://t.co/a3pl4WiDhZ
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) February 28, 2024
Earlier, Armstrong said that Coinbase was dealing with “a LARGE surge of traffic,” apologizing for any issues encountered.
Cryptocurrency exchanges often experience outages during Bitcoin rallies, which bring massive surges in user traffic and trading activity along with intensified unpredictability of Bitcoin’s price. If exchanges could reliably predict such surges and provision their data centers ahead of time, they would probably be wealthy enough to not need customers.
Even so, Coinbase’s history of going down during surges in traffic prompted crypto Twitter another opportunity to poke fun at the exchange, designating the familiar technical difficulties as a positive market indicator.
“Coinbase app is down,” Reflexivity Research co-founder Will Clemente wrote on Twitter. “We are SO back.”
“Coinbase crashing is a bullish signal,” Chateau Capital co-founder and COO Alex Valaitis said. “Retail is coming back!”
“This is like the canary in the coal mine that the giga bull is just getting started,” Zen Academy founder Zeneca said. “Retail… is coming?”
The history of bad days for Coinbase coming with good days for Bitcoin is well established. In 2017, Coinbase crashed as Bitcoin surged toward its then-all-time high of $19,345. Coinbase again crashed in April 2020 as the price of Bitcoin rose 15% overnight on April 29 as Bitcoin investors prepared for the Bitcoin halving in May and FOMO set in.
Coinbase has crashed as Bitcoin skyrockets today.
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) April 29, 2020
Coinbase crashed once more in January 2021 as the price of Bitcoin approached $40,000 before falling 25%, $8000, to $32000 the next day. When the value of BTC fell more than 30 percent in 24 hours in May of that year, another crash. What about when Bitcoin hit its all-time high in November 2021?
Coinbase reported ”connectivity issues again” a couple of weeks later.
We’re experiencing connectivity issues again across https://t.co/ohqDivCZYw and Coinbase Pro. This may cause failed trades, delayed transactions, and unexpected behavior on the webpage and mobile apps. We’re back at it to get this fixed and restore full service.
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) November 24, 2021
Traditional exchanges operate for 6 to 8 hours a day, five days a week, giving their developers ample time to address technical issues. Crypto exchanges generally operate 24/7, making it much more challenging to maintain the system, especially during times of high traffic.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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