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Key Takeaways
- A Coinbase outage impacted some users during intraday trading Wednesday as bitcoin surged to its highest price in years.
- The cryptocurrency exchange platform said it is aware of the problem and working to remedy it.
- Brian Armstrong, Coinbase co-founder and CEO, said the outage was due to a surge in traffic.
- Bitcoin climbed above the $63,000 mark for the first time since 2021 in intraday trading Wednesday.
A Coinbase (COIN) outage left some users to witness zero balance in their accounts and unable to trade Wednesday, even as bitcoin (BTCUSD) soared past $63,000.
A status update on the Coinbase website timestamped 9:40 a.m. Pacific Time said that customer assets were “safe” and that the exchange was “aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and may experience errors in buying or selling.”
With bitcoin rallying to its highest price since November 2021, a surge in traffic may have caused the service disruption, according to a post by Coinbase co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Brian Armstrong on X.
By 3:15 p.m. Eastern, Coinbase said it had begun seeing some improvement in customer trading but issues persisted due to high traffic. Armstrong also posted on X that traffic surge Wednesday was greater than 10x—the threshold Coinbase had tested it could handle.
While a direct correlation cannot be drawn, there was a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin in the immediate few minutes preceding Coinbase’s post about the interruption.
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Earlier today, there was another service disruption that involved delayed transactions for some Coinbase users trading on the Ethereum network. That issue was resolved close to 1:30 p.m. Eastern.
Coinbase shares gave up some of their earlier gains and were up 0.79%, trading a shade above $200 around 3:27 p.m. ET Wednesday. Bitcoin gave up its earlier gains, slipping under $60,000 before reclaiming that price milestone, higher by roughly 5% for the day.
(Update—Feb. 28, 2024: This story was updated to include more recent outage status provided by Coinbase, additional comments from Coinbase CEO Armstrong’s X posts and more current price movements.)