Coinbase and Bitfinex Go Down as Bitcoin Climbs ‎Back to $17,500‎

Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, is now completely offline, ‎though the outage appears to have begun several hours earlier, with ‎investors reporting problems on forums and social media channels. ‎

The outage kept many users from accessing their Bitcoin Bitcoin While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that Read this Term wallets as prices on the digital coin fluctuated wildly but rose today to hit the $17,500 threshold.

A status update on the website said “the service [is] unavailable” and that the company would perform maintenance on the site starting at 22:00 Pacific Time. At 23:22, the company said on Twitter that maintenance was complete, though some users responded that they still couldn't log in.

Some users blamed ‎heavy traffic, likely caused by the recent Bitcoin climb, for ‎crashing the website and its exchange gdax.com, which remains ‎down, although it is still quoting prices.‎

We are performing scheduled maintenance tonight at 10pm Pacific Time.

Coinbase services will be offline for 1 hour. This will significantly increase the amount of traffic we can handle and help to prevent slow performance and login issues during large traffic surges. — Coinbase (@coinbase) ١٢ ديسمبر، ٢٠١٧

Maintenance has been successfully completed and all services are operating as normal

— Coinbase (@coinbase) ١٢ ديسمبر، ٢٠١٧

Hong Kong-based Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex also said that its platform was ‎under distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS, that attempted to ‎paralyze its system with a flood of information.‎

The second largest US dollar-based Bitcoin exchange saw a spike in traffic ‎this Tuesday morning and the number of connections attempting to reach ‎the website was enough to temporarily disrupt its activity.‎

At 06:44 ET, on Twitter, Bitfinex stated that its website was under a ‎massive DDoS Attack DDoS Attack A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is defined as an attempt by malicious actor to overwhelm a targeted server, website, or network with a flood of internet traffic. Most often this takes the shape of a machine or network becoming unavailable to users for a period of time through the systematic disruption services of a host connected to the Internet.These attacks are most effective when multiple compromised computer systems and other internet-connected devices are exploited as sources A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is defined as an attempt by malicious actor to overwhelm a targeted server, website, or network with a flood of internet traffic. Most often this takes the shape of a machine or network becoming unavailable to users for a period of time through the systematic disruption services of a host connected to the Internet.These attacks are most effective when multiple compromised computer systems and other internet-connected devices are exploited as sources Read this Term, which managed to take it down.‎

We are currently under heavy DDOS. API is also down. We are working on further mitigation.

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) ١٢ ديسمبر، ٢٠١٧

DDoS attacks are fairly common against ‎cryptocurrency exchanges, especially the popular ones. However, DDoS ‎attacks are a bit less scary than hacks that cause clients to lose funds.‎

The hackers use cyberattacks mainly to manipulate the cryptocurrency ‎prices. Since the prices are set by several exchanges ‎around the world, temporarily shutting off an exchange can allow attackers ‎to find arbitrage opportunities, taking advantage of price differences.‎

The sustained problems in such big cryptocurrency exchanges raise concerns about whether they will be able ‎to reliably provide prices for upcoming crypto derivatives in regulated bourses, and how they ‎will be able to cope in the long run with the higher trading volumes that could come if institutional players ‎start transacting with digital assets.‏