Kraken, one of the world’s longest-operating cryptocurrency platforms, said on its website that it was experiencing technical issues that locked out clients of their accounts. Until a fix was implemented shortly, Kraken has temporarily halted the on-boarding of new users amid bitcoin’s parabolic price rally.
Currently so many exchanges including Kraken and Voyager are dealing with overloads in signups.
This is exactly like Coinbase overloads in 2017 around April, where everyone was trying to fomo in before the big run up. Just imagine if this was just the start ? — NekoZ (@CryptoNekoZ) February 8, 2021
Kraken’s status page posted an incident report about users suffering disrupted connection to the exchange's interface at 17:11 UTC.
“We are receiving reports of clients having difficulty connecting to the site and while using the Kraken app. The issue appears to be connected to very heavy traffic. Sign-ups are temporarily disabled due to extremely high demand. Our engineers are still working to resolve the issue, and we will share any updates as soon as they become available,” per its status page.
Indeed, this is a reoccurrence of a problem that often plagues the US crypto venues whenever bitcoin’s price and volume spike.
Offering its apology to disgruntled customers, Kraken blamed a sudden surge in usage as the culprit that caused the connection failure.
Additionally, clients reported slower than normal response times, and that the exchange’s application programming interface was down. Others complained of the difficulty connecting to the site, API and mobile apps.
A Gentle Reminder to Crypto Traders
After investigating the issue for nearly two hours, the exchange said it had identified the cause of the problem and was implementing a fix.
Kraken attributed the issues to ‘the very heavy traffic’. It has pointed to an unexpected surge in transactions and user volumes leading to a server outage. However, the exchange denied any connectivity issues are affecting Payments using the ‘Buy Crypto’ tool as well as card payments via web and mobile.
Hello Andrew,
Thank you for reaching out. The card payment issues we were experiencing earlier have been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Please follow https://t.co/SiYH5aAlw0 to get real-time updates. Best, Kraken — Kraken Support (@krakensupport) February 8, 2021
Nearly all digital currency exchanges have faced significant growing pains today as Bitcoin price hit a new all-time high after investors reacted to news that Tesla had purchased $1.5 million of the cryptocurrency. All of which led to unprecedented traffic that crippled the exchanges’ servers, akin to a DDoS attack.
The No.1 digital coin gained over $5600 in just one day, topping out ahead of $45,000.
Despite the ongoing development in crypto exchanges’ technical infrastructure and engineering staff, the latest incident reminds crypto traders that access to even major platforms may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant Volatility or volume.
