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.

END UPDATE

The Binance development team along with its CEO Changpeng Zhao–who was recently included in the

“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 

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.

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.