Amid all the market action, Poloniex – the largest altcoin exchange – has been hit with a sophisticated DDOS attack. While the exchange was able to mitigate the issue, many users are still reporting problems executing trades and withdrawing Bitcoins. Users are complaining that hours later their withdrawals still haven’t shown up in their wallets, while Poloniex hasn’t officially admitted to the problem, the moderators are asking users to submit support tickets.
The DDoS attack started last night as the exchange was inaccessible for a number of hours. Poloniex acknowledged the problem by posting a tweet from their official account:
DDoS; we're working to mitigate.
— Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) May 9, 2017
While the DDoS mitigation techniques worked, the exchange is still having issues. Some members on Whalepool claim that buy orders were suspended, however we didn’t find evidence of those claims. Furthermore, users on the chatbox are complaining of both deposits and withdrawals not going through, Poloniex hasn’t acknowledged that issue yet.
As Bitcoin’s price keeps rising with no end in sight, all alternative cryptocurrencies are caught in a bloodbath. A single look at the Poloniex markets shows that every single coin is in the red:
Furthermore, a few markets are also offline. According to Mirai, a moderator of Poloniex:
BCN & XRP wallets are currently undergoing maintenance and should be back as soon as the team is done.
Yesterday evening and late afternoon many users reported 502 bad gateway errors. It is unknown if the DDoS is a response to the declining altcoin markets, looking to create even more panic and push the price farther down. Due to the inability to access the exchange, as soon as the mitigation tactics were completed many traders went on to sell their stash and tried to withdraw their funds. To add insult to injury many of those withdrawals still haven’t gone through.
Moreover, users are complaining of funds being frozen. One user claimed :
“I have about 400ETH worth, frozen.”
Freezing accounts, suspending withdrawals, and downtimes are extremely detrimental to the exchange’s reputation at a critical time like this. Poloniex did not immediately respond to our inquiry.
Now is as good time as any to remind users to never store large amounts on an exchange. It is better to keep a wallet on your desktop with your portfolio of altcoins as no amount of DDoS or downtime will be able to take those coins away from you. On the other hand, if you leave the coins on an exchange, chances are when panic ensues and it comes time to make some traders, the coins will be inaccessible.
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my account is fine! The longest i had to wait was a few mins for a wthdrawal confirmation email!
And the poloniex admins in the trollbox are very helpful!
Poloniex doesnt get ANY credit! Not only did they reimburse everyone who had bitcoins stolen from their accounts a year ago or so, but they are fucking operating a massive site with crazy user base and almost 100 billion worth of coins trading! They deserve more credit for being able to operate with their fucking crazy DDOS attacks they are victims of!
U know, people get mad when they cant trade like every second of the day! u should just buy and hold for the long run and people freak out and act like if poloniex is down for one second they are gona loose everything
become a zen robot and never trade on emotion
When you review the amount of commissions Polo is making on a daily basis it is unacceptable to receive this sort of service. Do people realize this isn’t a shadow op site, this is a multi million dollar commercial site now. Imagine if any financial site like E-Trade or similar was down in this way . I have been a member since 2014 and have built a portfolio that hovers between 45 and 59k USD. I should not have to wonder if my funds are secure and have tickets with support take 6 days to get acknowledge and the. 3 days between replies. I have been a very loyal user for sometime but this was the last straw for me personally. Now since my l3 verification is 8 days old wih no progress so I have to move 7k USD each day and hope the site remains up until I can get my funds.
You weren’t around during the Mt. Gox or Crypsy days, were you? They were great too… until they disappeared with everyone’s coins. And the warnings were just like this. Crashing servers, lots of complaints, then poof, gone. With all YOUR money.
your right, but mt gox didnt keep 90 of customers coins in cold storage like poloniex…or coinbase…see if someone can hack poloniex they could hack someone like coinbase too! You really think coinbase could loose anymore than 10 of the hotwallets ? seriously, its different now!
And yeah I was “around” during the mt gox days, do u think I am 4 years old or something lol I remember the day it got hacked i was in vilcabamba and a bunch of older people who dont understand bitcoin were all saying how bitcoin lost half its value in an hour after mt gox was hacked and none of them realized that bitcoin itself wasnt “hacked” it was the fucking exchange holding all these hot wallet private keys in one place that someone accessed and used the bitcoin network fair n square, they simply stole someones keys which are fair game if u leavethem out like mtgox did for soeone in ther organization to steal…
but dude u cant just assume everyone is a bad person…plus the state of teh world is different there is no way the poloniex crew could get away with stealing nearly billions in altcoins and bitcoins…the earth is a big place but its not THAT big…no way you could get away with stealing that many bitcoins nowadays and get away with it…..many of the mt gox coins were mysteriously “found” which kinda proves it was some sort of inside job and hey maybe japanese government was in on it, maybe it was a move to crash the price of bitcoin by government agencies to allow them to have another chance to get in on bitcoin with a much lower price while the netork expands and grows without the expnenetial price incrase
I need to comment out that Today without knowing i send some ETC to Poloniex and I experience a 3 hour delay until I see it on the history. I was panicking and i thought I lost my money. Another SCAM site. But fortunately I get deposited the ETC and then I withdraw immediate to my cold storage without any problem. To all there that are experience similar issues, be patient , I think is a DDOS attack rather than a SCAM site. Then I shouldn’t be telling you this story.
I’m a zen trader, should I still just chill and ride the storm out?
My deposits on Riecoin have been frozen for quite a while. Considering the fact that I mine straight to the exchange and then sell fractions of my RIC at market highs, before investing in other coins, my profits have been taking a drastic hit.
I don’t think you fully understand what actually happened? they shut down the site but didn’t shut down the Trading Bots API so while every who was using main site on long margin trades got eaten and liquidated by the bots crashing the price while everyone was lock out. No one was able to get out of margin until they got liquidated the price plummeted within 4 mins everyone was broke!
ah DUUUUHHH aha but seriously yeah dude! what “STORM”? lol u mean the fact that you arent making like 40 percent profit everyday like we were getting used to over the weekend? LOL
dude u have to just relax and trust poloniex! And yeah so what if u cant INSTANTLY withdrawl ur money! if you ned to sell your BTC for CASH just use the USD Tether option to sell your BTC for dollar amounts and keep their value! polonix keeps all your coins in cold storage better than YOu ever could! Thats why I trust poloniex! And also steemit allow you to keep your steem insteem power which is “locked” by time, u have to “power down” to make it liquid over a course of 14 weeks…so hackeers would have to stay in ur steemit account at least awhoel week and then coudl only get a small 7 percent fraction of your money!
in the interest of full disclosure I was the user who posted that comment in the poloniex trollbox having 400ETH frozen.
I think it’s important for anyone reading the original article to know that my account was eventually unlocked and I retrieved my funds from poloniex. It did take over a week for things to get resolved, and the experience was frustrating as polo feels like a zoo at times (especially that week). And with the owners being rather shielded from users – there are no phone numbers, no emails, the only way to interact with polo support is by raising a ticket and then flagging a mod in the trollbox and beg and hope for the best – things feel shady and it’s easy to panic if you have funds locked up and are not getting a human response for days on end.
The mods are nice though, and again, things did get resolved to my satisfaction, so my faith in polo is somewhat restored. They are the most liquid exchange in the US, they ARE in the US, and the mods are just cool. The trollbox is kinda fun, I’d never had a social element to trading on an exchange before.
I do wish that they would grow up though. I am not sure if they expected the volumes they are seeing now (it does seem based on the constant freezes that they were not), but they’ve hit on a very lucrative business. It seems that they are victims of their own success. If they invest more in technology and support, and if they go the route of coinbase and submit to regulation (get the freaking licenses wherever you need them, come on), I’d be a big fan.
As things stand at the moment – I do plan to use polo for liquidity, but I do not plan to keep them as a replacement for a wallet. In retrospect that was a rookie’s mistake, but I think a lot of people are still just doing it, probably due to a combination of laziness, ignorance and wishful thinking as was the case with me. Following every trade, you should transfer your funds out to a personal wallet, and you should keep as little stored with polo as you can get away with. This doesn’t work for day traders and people going along for the joy rides, but that’s not my problem (I have a longer term strategy, I think it works better in the current world of crypto madness).
Well this feels like an essay, but perhaps it will be helpful to other fellow explorers.
help me my account in poloniex is just frozen what shoulf i do ?
They’ve also had 1000% increase in users in the last 4 months. It’s scaling issues pure and simple. They’ve got $1,000,000 a day in fees to throw at the issue, but money doesn’t fix software scaling problems instantly.
-I hope
Always.
Hey thanks for the update, appreciate the thoughts and it’s good that you came out OK (I hope you didn’t sell those ETH).
They’re definitely having major scaling problems with up to 1000% user increase in 4 months, and scaling is a difficult problem, you can’t just throw xMillion at it to solve it, it takes time and lots of work too.
How is it possible a EXCHANGE in the US can freeze account, INSIDE TRADING and can do many more bad things.
Our lawyers received many resources. We are building at this moment a CASE against Poloniex. We can’t allow this because Poloniex hold around $27 / $28 million of our capital.
the support team just dont give a fuck, i have a withdraw insue and they cant even respond a fuckin ticket, im waiting about 25 days and nothing, money locked.
My Polo account has been frozen for 21 days with not a word from support on my ticket. ?
I have my POLO account frozen since 2 days now. I froze it by myself because they kind of scaring me with messages speaking of hacking. I have opened a ticket to unfreeze it but no response at all. it should be easy to just unfreeze an account. In addition there is no more trollbox, so I can not speak with a MOD and everything is suspended in the air without any feedback from them. In the mean time BTC is going down quickly and I am loosing money.
I have my POLO account frozen since 2 days now. I froze it by myself because they kind of scaring me with messages speaking of hacking. I have opened a ticket to unfreeze it but no response at all. it should be easy to just unfreeze an account. In addition there is no more trollbox, so I can not speak with a MOD and everything is suspended in the air without any feedback from them. In the mean time BTC is going down quickly and I am loosing money
my id is balramchaoudhary@gmail.com
my account is locked from 8 days.please unlock my account.
my support number is -307847 but the support team did not unlock my account.
please unlock my account.i and my all family thankful for unlocked my account.
Frozen acc
#215391
#326772
more than a month have passed
dont use them my account has been frozen for 2 months no support reply i have over $200 frozen 🙁 its like the whole support team quit or something this bad
i have the same problem as you and i want to account unfrozen its been 2 months and they havent said anything back i have $200 in eth frozen
Hi, i have my account frozen for nearly three weeks now. No respond on my 2 tickets at all of supportstaff!!!! Horrible! I wish i had red your post sooner !
My account the same, for nearly 3 weeks now. 🙁 Not a word from support.
2 months?! Mine nearly 3 weeks and no sign of support! Poloniex is turning into a scam!
For you it’s easy to say. But what a bout if your account is frozen for weeks with no word of support?!
wow, I didn’t realize this thread had generated so much discussion.
I imagine with the delays taking even more time, and with the troll box now disabled, things must be even more frustrating for anyone affected.
I’d suggest try to flag polo’s twitter accounts. I know that’s what i’d be doing though who knows if it’d help any.
Aw, this was an incredibly nice post. Finding the time and actual effort to generate a good article… but what can I say… I put things off a whole lot and never manage to get nearly anything done.