Coinbase
Global CEO Brian Armstrong said operations are recovering at the exchange after a surge in traffic earlier in the day swamped its systems and caused problems for users, such as accounts that displayed $0 balances in error.
Armstrong said on social media that the company had tested a surge of 10-times traffic, but Coinbase’s experience on Wednesday exceeded that.
The issues arose the same day the price of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, surged to its highest level since late 2021. Bitcoin reached $64,038 during the day, but fell back to around $60,379 in late afternoon trading. It was up 6.3% on Wednesday.
“We are aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and may experience errors in buying or selling,” Coinbase said in a notice on its website at around 12:40 p.m. Eastern time. It was investigating the issue, the note said.
The exchange later posted updates. At around 4:00 p.m. Eastern, it said activity was normalizing. Earlier in the day it reported that customers were seeing errors in their login, sends, receives and with some payment methods and errors in buying and selling on the platform. Things gradually started to improve in the afternoon.
Coinbase said the issues were related to heightened traffic, and that it would continue to monitor its systems.
Earlier in the day, Armstrong posted on X that “We are dealing with a LARGE surge of traffic—apologies for any issues you encounter. The team is working to remediate.”
Write to Janet H. Cho at janet.cho@dowjones.com
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