Deribit Suffers Outage Over 'Hardware Issues,' May Miss Thursday's Options Expiry

UPDATE (09:35 UTC, Aug. 27, 2020): Deribit has tweeted the issue is resolved and trading is once again live.

The most popular cryptocurrency options exchange, Deribit, is suffering a severe service outage.

According to company tweets early on Thursday, the trading platform is suffering "hardware issues" and a technician has been called to reboot its servers and bring services back to normal functionality.
"We are not hacked and your funds are safe," an initial tweet stated.
Deribit went on to warn that it may not have its systems back online in time for today's daily options expiry.
In that case, the firm will "manually adjust the options expiry to reflect the actual market at the time of expiry."
The value used for the adjustment would be drawn from Deribit's index as listed on test.deribit.com.
However, the outage may knock confidence in the exchange with the news that Deribit doesn't seem to have server redundancy to avoid such severe ramifications from technical issues.
Similar issues have affected top U.S. spot exchange Coinbase in the past, leading it to eventually pledge to do more in terms of redundancy provision.
Deribit may, in fact, have been lucky the outage didn't occur Friday, when over $700 million-worth of monthly contracts are set to expire, most of them on Deribit.
Today's daily bitcoin option expiry is worth $22.8 million, alongside $6.5 million in ether options.
Deribit is by far the most popular options exchange in the crypto space in terms of trading volumes:

CoinDesk - Unknown — Bitcoin options volumes (Deribit in red)

Also read: Fidelity’s Chief Strategist Starts Bitcoin Index Fund

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