Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges which is said to be the fastest growing startup in history, has been offline for several hours.
UPDATE 10PM PST:
Binance’s CEO released another statement on twitter stating that there will be another delay (about 10 hours) before the exchange comes back online. In the meantime there will be a 30 minute window to withdraw any funds.
Still waiting on data copy, it will take a while, another 10 hrs at the current estimate. Due to the unexpected length of time, we will allow 30 mins for people to withdraw orders before trading resumes when system is back.
— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018
END UPDATE
The Binance development team along with its CEO Changpeng Zhao–who was recently included in the Forbes list of cryptocurrency’s richest people–announced that a server issue led the trading platform to be taken offline temporarily for maintenance.
“Due to a significant increase in users and trading activity, Binance will need to extend the System upgrade and is expected to be completed by 2PM (UTC),” the Binance team stated, noting that trading will remain disabled during this period. “Withdrawals and trading during this period will remain suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience.”
Including the several hours Binance had been offline prior to the official announcement of the Binance team, by 2PM UTC, the trading platform would have had been offline for more than 14 hours.
The initial announcement of the Binance team led to some confusion among traders and investors on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange because it explained that a maintenance is ongoing and that traders may experience a temporary decrease in exchange performance.
However, by that time, traders were already unable to execute orders, withdraw, and deposit funds. The exchange had been frozen and was unable to execute any operations when the Binance team posted the following tweet
A system maintenance is in progress, some users may experience a temporary decrease in exchange performance while this in underway.Thank you for your understanding.
— binance (@binance_2017) February 8, 2018
Many traders were understandably frustrated with the statement of the Binance team that described the event as a “maintenance”, as orders were stuck and the trading platform stopped functioning. Quickly thereafter, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao released a follow up statement, emphasizing that the exchange experienced a server issue and that it may take several hours to fix.
We experienced a server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync. Need to fully resync from master. Due the size of the data, it will take several hours. No data is lost. We appreciate your understanding and support.
— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018
During this period, OKEx, the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency trading platform of OKCoin, formerly China’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, became the global market’s biggest cryptocurrency trading platform by daily trading volume, overtaking South Korea’s Upbit and Binance.
Prior to this temporary technical issue, Binance was easily the largest exchange in the world, followed by Upbit and OKEx.
Given that the Binance team has already discovered the core issue of the minor server outage, as Zhao mentioned, the trading platform will likely recover soon immediately after the full re-synchronization of data of the master server is complete. In the meantime, for the next several hours, traders will be unable to make, cancel, or modify existing orders.
