Coinbase Buckles: Exchange Goes Down as BTC Spikes Past $10K

The time has finally come. Bitcoin has managed to smash through the $10,000 psychological barrier, after a long period of recovery from the COVID-fueled market crash. As the price surged up, however, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges out there, Coinbase, experienced technical issues and was forced to go down for about an hour. While everyone appreciates a good joke, doing the same thing over and over again tends to have its value lost, something the US-based company doesn’t seem to understand.

Volatile Markets Lead To Testy Exchanges

Earlier today, the world’s first cryptocurrency had finally pushed past the resistance level at the $10,000 mark, doing so after several failed attempts. As a result, most forms of altcoin seemed to move upwards as the total market cap of the industry increased by 5%, standing at $284 billion as opposed to $270 billion.

However, it seems that the major crypto exchanges don’t plan for sudden market fluctuations, Coinbase being the subject at hand. During this massive price pump, the leading US-based crypto exchange went down, citing technical issues in a status update. Particularly, the platform observed “increased latency” and had the issue investigated shortly after

System Going Down At 2 AM EST

Coinbase didn’t see it fit to grace the public as to what happened exactly, as they kept the nature of the problem hidden at large. However, the problem was quickly identified and fixed, with only a bit less than an hour in downtime occurring due to the event.

Downdetector, a monitoring resource, had detected a similar event occurring within the same approximate timeframe, noting the number of reports and complaints that had been leveled against Coinbase to have happened around 2 AM, EST. The majority of these complaints focused on general issues with the website itself, but a large portion of these users further complained that they couldn’t log into their accounts.

A Repeat Offender

Bitcoin is still trading past the $10,000 mark, trading at $10,150 at the time of writing, which is a good sign, if a bit pre-emptive.

Crypto exchanges are expected to allow their investors and traders full access during these times of volatility, allowing them to react to the price developments at large. Should a crypto exchange go down, by contrast, it makes its users extremely unhappy. This is doubly so for an exchange of the magnitude that Coinbase is, only amplifying the amount of outrage they’d feel. However, Coinbase has had a string of technical issues whenever major price movements occurred.