Coinbase Suffers Temporary Outage as Bitcoin Soars as High as $8,900

Coinbase experienced a brief outage Wednesday as the price of bitcoin rallied to just below $9,000. 

According to Coinbase’s status page, the exchange’s website, mobile app, and API website experienced major outages. Several Twitter users also noted the connectivity issues with screenshots of the Coinbase website and mobile app. 

Kraken reported some issues connecting with its API as well on Wednesday, though it said its platform had returned to normal operations by 18:56 UTC.

Coinbase has gone down during volatile trading days in the past. In June 2019, the exchange's site and API went down during a nearly $2,000 fall over a 15-minute period, an issue that Coinbase Pro users appear to have experienced again in November 2019.

Before Wednesday, the site went down in March 2020 during the crypto market's "Black Thursday" crash, when bitcoin shed more than 20% of its value in under 30 minutes.

These issues date as far back as 2017, when Coinbase suspended ethereum and litecoin trades due to outages on its platform.

Coinbase is the largest U.S.-based exchange by traded volume, according to data aggregator CoinGecko.

Still, Coinbase reported over $300 million in daily volume by Wednesday afternoon, which dwarfed its volume for the previous seven days, according to data from Skew. 

Coinbase tweeted an announcement about its fix late Wednesday afternoon. The outage "only affected customers’ ability to access Coinbase and Coinbase Pro UIs, and did not impact trading via our APIs or the health of the underlying markets," the company said.

Bitcoin’s price has been on a tear since it crashed to $4,800 in early March. It’s in the middle of its seventh straight weekly gain off of the March lows. 

The cryptocurrency’s price jumped as high as 15% Wednesday, rising from $7,700 to over $8,900 in 17 hours.

UPDATE (April 29, 2020 20:26 UTC): The headline for this piece has been updated to remove Kraken, which only experienced website and API connectivity issues, not a temporary outage.

UPDATE (April 29, 2020 21:25 UTC): This article has been updated to include Coinbase's public comments about the outage.