The website of cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase apparently crashed just as bitcoin price continues to march higher towards three-year highs near $17,000 per coin. Coinbase users trying to access their portfolio were met with a message that the site is “temporarily unavailable.”
According to a company update on Monday, Coinbase said the website and mobile apps are not loading, adding that it is “currently investigating the issue,” but no further comment was provided.
Coinbase acknowledged short outages throughout the day before declaring the incident was resolved and as of writing was monitoring the results.
Bitcoin price has been steadily climbing this month, partly in response to PayPal announcing it finally started allowing customers to buy and sell Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies using their online wallets.
The San Francisco-based crypto exchange has suffered a number of outages during busy trading periods this year, likely due to a massive selloff by whales and other investors. The most notable incident came in March when the crypto community was gearing up for the bitcoin supply squeeze, known as a halving, which also caused trading to halt.
Additionally, Coinbase users were locked out of their accounts during the outage triggered by the coronavirus crash that wiped more than 20% from bitcoin's value in less than an hour.
Coinbase users reported being unable to trade during these times of peak Bitcoin Volatility at least three times over the course of 2020.
Unfortunately, price surges occur often when traders want to buy and sell the most. In such cases, potential profits can simply disappear when they cannot do anything.
The timing of bitcoin surging and Coinbase going down reminded the community of the 2017 bull market when the crypto exchange could not handle the heightened activity just as bitcoin price hit a peak of nearly $20,000.
