Kraken, Coinbase Suffer Outages Amid Market Volatility

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

By Zack Voell

Jan 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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Zack Voell

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