Coinbase, a digital currency wallet and platform host to over 20M users, experienced an outage that lasted from 1:44 A.M 10th August GMT to 6:11 P.M 10th August GMT. The outage disabled trades on the BTC-USD currency trade, which noticeably upset a few users as it was one of Coinbase’s most traded pairs.
After the outage began, the price of Bitcoin stood still and stayed that way at $6,556.25. The issue was identified roughly an hour later and Coinbase acknowledged that they were working on resolving so that trades between BTC-USD could be resumed.
An hour later Coinbase cleared all open orders from the order book and moved into post-only mode so that trade could be restored on BTC-USD. Over five hours later Coinbase admitted that their BTC-USD order book ‘did not meet sufficient liquidity’.
Many users of Coinbase headed to social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter to vent their frustration with the outage. What didn’t help matters was that during the time in which trading was halted on Coinbase, the price for Bitcoin was dropping on other exchanges, leaving Coinbase users in a state of limbo. When Coinbase finally announced on Twitter that they had resolved the incident, they were met with less than pleasant reactions.
The reactions didn’t get any better on Reddit with people doubting Coinbase’s ability to operate a large company, while others complained of having jumped ship from Coinbase after having been locked out multiple times.
It goes without saying that Coinbase has clearly rattled some of its users and will need to do a better job in the future of addressing issues relating to outages.
