News
Some Coinbase users unable to trade, seeing zero balance due to outage as Bitcoin soars
Key points
- A Coinbase outage impacted some users during intraday trading Wednesday as bitcoin rose to its highest price in years.
- The cryptocurrency exchange platform said it was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it.
- Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, said the outage was due to an increase in traffic.
- On Wednesday, Bitcoin surpassed the $63,000 mark for the first time since 2021 in intraday trading.
A base of coins (CURRENCY) outage left some users with zero balances in their accounts and unable to trade on Wednesday, even though bitcoin (BitcoinUSD) rose above $63,000.
A status update on Coinbase’s website timestamped 9:40 a.m. Pacific Time says that customer assets are “safe” and that the exchange is “aware that some users may see a zero balance on their Coinbase accounts and may encounter errors in purchasing or selling.”
With bitcoin hitting its highest price since November 2021, an increase in traffic may have caused the service outage, according to a post from Coinbase co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO)Brian Armstrong on X.
By 7:15 pm Eastern, Coinbase said it had restored all services on Coinbase.com, although some customers continued to see incorrect account balances. Earlier in the day, the exchange admitted that high traffic had caused some of the problems faced by its users. Armstrong also posted on X that Wednesday’s traffic increase was more than 10x — the threshold Coinbase had tested it could handle.
While a direct correlation cannot be drawn, there was a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin in the few minutes immediately preceding Coinbase’s post about the outage.
TradingView
Today there was another service outage resulting in transaction delays for some Coinbase users trading on the Ethereum network. The issue was resolved around 1:30 pm Eastern.
Coinbase shares gave back some of their earlier gains and rose 0.79%, trading just above $200 around 3:27 pm ET on Wednesday. Bitcoin gave up earlier gains, slipping below $60,000 before reclaiming that price mark, higher by about 5% for the day.
(Update: February 28, 2024: This story has been updated to include the most recent outage status provided by Coinbase, additional comments from Coinbase CEO Armstrong’s X posts, and more current price movements.)