Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has suffered a breach outage yesterday, August 17, after the price of bitcoin surged past the $12,000 mark and traffic on the exchange surged as a result.
On social media Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the exchange, revealed the traffic spike led to a new all-time high in terms of system traffic, going above the traffic Binance saw in December 2017, when the price of bitcoin hit its all-time high near $20,000.
Zhao added that the traffic limit being hit only lasted a few minutes, and that auto-scaling was “a little behind.” As a result, the cryptocurrency exchange ended up serving users errors, and screenshots of these errors were quickly shared on social media.
Various users complained they entered leveraged positions before the traffic spike got Binance down, with a lot of users claiming they depended on the trading platform for income. Data from SimilarWeb, which uses the cryptocurrency exchange’s own Google Analytics data, shows that last month Binance handled around 24.95 million visits.
Offering users a solution, Zhao pointed to Binance’s desktop app, which according to him is “very fast and usually avoids the 404 or 502 errors.” The outage, nevertheless, seemed to be brief as the exchange managed to quickly correct the situation.
Cryptocurrency exchanges suffering outages over traffic surges is nothing new. Back in June, Coinbase suffered outages after seeing its traffic surge 5x in only four minutes, which made its autoscaling solution unable to keep up. While trading through its API remained functional, Coinbase.com and Coinbase Pro, as well as its mobile applications, went down.
Data from CryptoCompare’s August 2019 Exchange Review seems to show Binance and Coinbase were among the cryptocurrency exchanges that see larger traffic spikes when the cryptocurrency market moves. Now, other exchanges with high trading volumes, including Huobi, OKEx, and Btifinex, likely also see traffic change when the market moves.
Featured image by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.