Kraken’s Upgrade Isn’t Going Smoothly, but Customer Funds are Safe

The Kraken exchange is currently undergoing one of the longest maintenance routines in the company’s history. Although this upgrade was originally scheduled for December, it seems the team has finally gotten around to making some much-needed infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately, it seems things are taking a lot longer than originally anticipated. Fixing its horrible system will take a lot of time, but the company can only come out stronger in the end.

Kraken Infrastructure Upgrade is a Major Project

Many people know all too well how difficult, annoying, and borderline frustrating it can be to use the Kraken exchange. The company offers all of the right trading markets – including fiat currency gateways – yet it has been unable to provide a streamlined service for more than a year now. Especially throughout 2017, their service quickly went from bad to absolutely atrocious. Outages, API errors, orders not being fulfilled, and severe lag were getting all too common for the average Kraken user to deal with.

Thankfully, the company finally acknowledged something had to change. It announced a major infrastructure overhaul in late December 2017. Users were quite disappointed when the promised upgrades did not arrive and the service only grew more annoying to deal with. Fast forward to today, and we’re finally seeing the exchange upgrade its systems as promised. If it does so in a proper manner, most users will quickly forgive them for the extra delays these past few weeks. For now, however, no one knows for sure if this maintenance will make things better or worse.

It is very difficult to please Kraken customers these days, though. Although everyone was warned about this upgrade well in advance, a lot of people are still outraged due to the servers still being offline. More specifically, the maintenance began on January 10 at 9 p.m. Pacific Time, and at the time, the goal was to be back up and running within two hours. As of 1 a.m. Pacific Time on January 12, the platform was still not operational. It seems the team ran into a lot more problems than they originally anticipated. This is both good and bad, mind you.

One thing the company is doing well is providing regular updates as the maintenance drags on. It quickly became apparent the upgrade would cause some delays, but that is only to be expected when things like this take place. Moreover, the company indicated that the upgrade went “much more slowly than anticipated”, which is a rather vague message. It seems that once the installation was compiled, the Kraken team ran into a few issues during final testing, which threw any ETA out of the window almost immediately. So far, most of the issues have been addressed, but there’s still more work to do.

According to the most recent update, the team is still working on final testing as of right now. This is mainly being done to ensure server stability and an optimal experience for all Kraken users. No one on the outside knows if the company is working on hardware or software upgrades right now. In an ideal scenario, they would tackle both problems at the same time, but doing so can cause a lot of unforeseen problems. There is still no official timeline as to when the exchange will be back online. Users will simply have to wait, unfortunately.

It is of the utmost importance to note that Kraken confirmed all user funds are safe and accounted for. Nothing has gone wrong in this regard, which should put a lot of customers’ minds at ease. It is unfortunate the upgrade is taking so long, but we would all rather see Kraken return with a perfect service rather than patch things along the way for the foreseeable future. All of this is getting people excited as well, as everyone wants to see what they are waiting for exactly. This upgrade needs to pay off for Kraken, as the company may end up losing a huge portion of its customer base if the service remains subpar.