Major US-based crypto exchange Coinbase was temporarily overwhelmed by a traffic spike during Bitcoin’s latest surge towards $10K. 

Exchange overwhelmed by 5x normal traffic

According to a 6 June blog post from a Coinbase software engineer, the exchange saw its autoscaling overwhelmed when hit by 5x normal volume for more than 4 minutes at around 16:05 PDT on 1 June, as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) neared $10K. 

The traffic spike hit several internal Coinbase services, increasing latency, and leaving many users unable to login. Apparently, the request error rate hit 50% at one point during the incident. 

At 16:20, Coinbase redeployed the API, increasing the number of machines dealing with the traffic. Though this led to another two-minute outage, the exchange was back fully operational shortly after. 

It is the fifth time Coinbase has gone offline during the past three months during significant Bitcoin (BTC) price moves. 

Coinbase failing users at most pressing times

On 1 Just, when Bitcoin rallied from around $9,600 to $10,380 in under an hour, Coinbase users were unable to access their accounts. On 9 May, two days before the halving, BTC crashed by nearly $2,000 in under 24 hours, and again, Coinbase users found the service unavailable. On 29 April, BTC rose almost 12%… and yet again users were locked out. And, on 12 March, during that month’s crash, some Coinbase users found themselves unable to login and make trades.

Coinbase has said the issues were caused by “connectivity issues” on 1 June, 9 May, and 29 April, and network congestion on 12 March.

AYO.NEWS says:

To a casual observer, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is potentially very serious. Coinbase is proving itself unreliable just at the times when it is most important for traders to be able to access their accounts – obviously leading to significant potential losses for some. 

Furthermore, these outages are rapidly eroding trust in the platform, with some social media users openly speculating that the United States’ busiest exchange is intentionally crashing its own website to manipulate the markets. 

While Coinbase’s technical explanations may well be perfectly valid, with several major exchanges already being accused of market manipulation in the law courts, Coinbase can’t afford to be looking suspicious right now. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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