Quite a few Bitcoin users were concerned over the Coinbase exchange earlier this week. At one point during the day, the website’s front end seemed to stop working, and a few users were unable to access their account. A similar incident affected the GDAX platform and the Coinbase API. The company was performing maintenance to solve these issues, and most services have been restored to normal right now.
Brief Coinbase Issues Have Bitcoin Holders Concerned
Given the recent demand for Bitcoin over the past few weeks, exchange platforms have to do everything they can to optimize platform speed and accessibility. Coinbase had discovered an issue on January 4th, and it took some time to get all services back up and running again. If traders can’t access the website, it becomes difficult for them to buy or sell cryptocurrency.
During the investigation, the Coinbase engineers have noticed how performance remained “slightly degraded” on January 5th. Unfortunately, this also affected the mobile Coinbase app, and an unscheduled maintenance had to be scheduled to resolve all of these issues swiftly.
Things only got more troublesome as it became clear this outage seemed to spread to the Coinbase API and GDAX trading platform. It remains unclear what caused these issues exactly, yet the engineering team has managed to stabilize the website and mobile app in the meantime.
After several hours of hard work, Coinbase and GDAX were able to resume their services as normal. All APIs are functioning at their normal speed as well. Incidents like these can affect any bitcoin exchange in the world at any given time. With Bitcoin being in high demand – both for buying and selling – it is to be expected some platforms will be overloaded with traffic.
Unfortunately, this creates a fair bit of frustration among people who rely on these services, as bad news tends to travel very fast and cause a panic across the markets. It is unclear if the Coinbase and GDAX issues had anything to do with the Bitcoin price crash yesterday, though. Chinese traders dictate the global Bitcoin price most of the time, and it is doubtful any of them uses Coinbase in the first place.
Albeit the website’s issues have been resolved, Coinbase is currently investigating another problem. A major outage is affecting the PayPal integration, preventing users from completing PayPal sell orders. The issue has been identified, and all orders will be canceled automatically. Funds will be credited back to the Coinbase account until this issue is resolved. Considering how this problem was discovered on January 1st, it seems to take a very long time to rectify the problem.
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