Yesterday, we reported that bitcoin had broken a new record by reaching $3,000, following that it tumbled quite rapidly, more so than it has in years. This downtrend appears to have prompted an influx of traffic at bitcoin exchanges leading to outages for some users.
The most popular exchange that was affected was Coinbase, according to its status website it says that:
“11:08 PDT – Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have received a “service unavailable” message when visiting Coinbase.com. We appreciate your patience while our team actively work to resolve this issue.
16:07 PDT – Coinbase is now serving all customer’s traffic. We’re continuing to monitor for instability and slow load times.
16:44 PDT – We have identified and resolved the issue caused by high traffic today.”
On Sunday, bitcoin reached a record high of $3,041.36 but by Monday had experienced its largest crash since January 2015, falling 16 percent down to $2,532.87. BTE-E was another site to be affected by the influx of traffic, in their case, it even looks like they mistook the surge of users for a denial of service attack.
Whether it was people trying to get out of bitcoin or into the ecosystem with the low prices (it was probably a mixture of both sorts of people) is unclear, but one Twitter user appeared to be angry that they couldn"t access Coinbase in order to buy into the currency. That Twitter user grilled Coinbase Support for “scamming people” because the site, in practice, can only handle the load when prices are high.
Source: RT | Image via Bitcoin Gator