Coinbase Suffers Brief Outage as Bitcoin Tumbles 10% in 30 Minutes

Coinbase experienced a brief outage Saturday as the price of bitcoin crashed 10% in 30 minutes.

According to Coinbase’s status page, the exchange’s website, mobile app, and API website experienced partial outages beginning at 17:26 Pacific time (00:26 UTC). Ten minutes later, the San Francisco-based company said it was still investigating. Prominent Twitter accounts also noted Coinbase’s outage as the price of Bitcoin tumbled from $9,500 to $8,100. 

By 18:14 UTC on the West Coast, service had been restored for the San Francisco-based company's consumer and professional trading sites. Reached Saturday evening, a spokesperson for Coinbase declined to comment beyond what was on the status page, which said the exchange was monitoring the situation. 

Other U.S. exchanges, including Kraken, reported all systems as operational during the weekend price crash. 

Coinbase experienced a similar outage last week when bitcoin rallied 15% to $8,900. At the time of publishing, Coinbase’s volume was not excessively high relative to other peaks in trading volume during the past two weeks, according to data provider Skew.

Cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase tend to suffer temporary outages during periods of acute price volatility.

The weekend sell-off comes just days before bitcoin's next halving, a hotly anticipated once-in-four-years event whose implications for the cryptocurrency's price are a subject of debate in crypto trading circles.