As Bitcoin and Ethereum take a tumble, the spike in user traffic at both Coinbase and GDAX have resulted in outages and trading freezes respectively.
On Monday at the time of press, bitcoin is down nearly 7.5% on the day while Ethereum is closer to a significant 20%, driving opportunistic investors to partake in a buying frenzy while prices fall.
The ensuing traffic on Coinbase and GDAX, an exchange operated by Coinbase for more professional traders has impacted both websites.
GDAX revealed it was temporarily halting trading completely for all trading pairs, stating:
We are temporarily halting trading across all products and moving to post-only mode while we work to restore service to all customers.
While GDAX’s website remains functional, Coinbase is – once again – experiencing a complete outage.
“Coinbase is currently down for maintenance,” states a message under a banner that reads ‘Service Unavailable’ on its homepage.
Coinbase’s status page further revealed that the exchange has disabled Ethereum buying and selling on its platform.
A status message read:
Coinbase.com is continuing to experience high traffic, and customers may continue to have trouble accessing the site. We’ve temporarily disabled Ethereum buys and sells while we restore services to all customers.
Jun 26, 09:49 PDT
This is the fourth major outage at Coinbase in recent weeks, particularly during times of market volatility. In entirely similar circumstances, bitcoin surged to a then all-time high of $2,740 before falling $300 on May 25th, leading to Coinbase pointing to ‘unprecedented traffic and trading volume’ behind its outage at the time. When bitcoin prices struck a high of $3,000 before falling over $400 the following day two weeks ago, Coinbase went offline yet again. As bitcoin fell to a low of $,2050 in the following days, Coinbase went offline yet again.
A technical post-mortem analysis of the many outages revealed a 10x growth in user traffic, with a Coinbase engineer stating the exchange is “investing significant resources to make our systems scale with the next 10x growth in traffic.”
Meanwhile, today’s downtime has understandably left Bitcoiners and Ethereans none too pleased about yet another outage.
If I miss a buy opportunity becuase of your temporary freeze, I am moving all my money out of gdax and coinbase.
— Mike Sifuentes (
I've been waiting two hours now and still "pending" for my first ETH buy. Is this uncertainty and hours long wait what I should expect?
