Kraken, Coinbase Suffer Outages Amid Market Volatility

Spillover from market drama on Wall Street is crippling U.S. crypto exchanges.

AccessTimeIconJan 29, 2021 at 4:26 p.m. UTC
Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 11:03 a.m. UTC
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Some of the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges are having trouble handing Friday's market volatility.

  • Kraken's trading is enabled again although "intermittent connectivity issues" remain 17 hours after the company's entire site was relegated to full "maintenance mode" Thursday morning.
  • The company battled a second day of severe connectivity issues after Thursday saw an outage of the exchange's trading API, though the web interface was still operational.
  • Coinbase also suffered "performance degradation," per its status page. And as the exchanged worked on a fix, reports of the exchange disabling USD buys circulated on Twitter. A Coinbase spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk that USD buys were down, saying it was related to the outage issues.
  • Several hours after the incident occured, Coinbase updated the status page to say "trading is 100% backup [sic]," which was followed by another update shortly thereafter saying "all services are back up" and Coinbse is "continuing to monitor for any future issues."
  • Bitcoin's price shot up nearly 20% early Friday morning to over $38,000.
  • These two exchanges have suffered downtime already this month, with both venues going down after bitcoin traded above $39,000 for the first time in early January, per CoinDesk's prior reporting.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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