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 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 , 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.
