Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, says it’s monitoring a fix for a partial outage that affected its website and app for around two hours on Tuesday. According to the company’s status page, users experienced difficulties logging in or loading pages — and while the rest of the company’s infrastructure wasn’t affected, the easiest ways to use those services were cut off.
Coinbase announced on Twitter that it was having network connectivity issues at around 12:39PM ET and announced that a fix was being implemented around an hour and a half later. Around 3PM ET, the company announced that the fix had been implemented, and it was monitoring to make sure it was working.
Network latency is improving. We are aware that some users may still be experiencing network latency across https://t.co/ohqDivCZYw, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Prime. We’ll continue to post updates here and on our Statuspage, as we work to remove latency across all services. https://t.co/IcA6wtHXDd
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) November 8, 2022
The outage occurred as FTT, a cryptocurrency associated with another major exchange called FTX started crashing, and as yet another exchange, Binance, announced that it intends to acquire FTX. It’s not the first time that Coinbase has struggled to cope with a surge in trading; earlier this year and in 2021, it had major outages as cryptocurrency prices in general plummeted. This instance doesn’t seem to be as severe, though there are likely fewer traders pounding Coinbase’s servers than when, say, Ethereum or Bitcoin’s prices start fluctuating.