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The Coinbase website crashed when the bitcoin price was nearing a three-year high to almost $17,000 each. Users were unable to access their portfolios and got a message from Coinbase support. They are not happy with the frequency of outages.

The steady rise in bitcoin prices was prompted, in large part, by payment processor PayPal's big announcement that its crypto trading service is now available. Customers can buy, sell, and hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their online PayPal wallets.

ON Monday, Coinbase said its “website and mobile apps are not loading” and it is investigating the problem. There were a series of intermittent outages throughout the day.

On Twitter,  the company acknowledged the issues and assured customers they were “working on a fix.”

At around 4:30 pm central time, Coinbase customer support announced that they had implemented a fix, and “there should be no more connectivity issues" on its platforms.

Coinbase website November 15 pause

Coinbase customers are not too happy with the downtime since there have been several inconvenient crashes this year. A day before the latest outage on November 15,  there was a “temporary pause” to prepare the platform for the hard fork. The crypto community has been gearing up for the "halving" or the hard fork of the bitcoin supply. 

It is worth noting that in the hours leading up to the pause, bitcoin and ethereum hit record highs. During the pause, traders were unable to access their digital wallets on Coinbase.

History of crashing at inconvenient times

Bitcoin price has been steadily climbing this month, partly in response to PayPal announcing it finally started allowing customers to buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies using their online wallets.

The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange has a reputation as being user-friendly, but the number of outages is concerning.  It has a history of outages during busy trading periods. In 2020, cryptocurrencies had several extremely busy days. Industry observers are speculating that the website is crashing whenever there are big selloffs by whales. Coinbase users pointed out that the exchange crashed three times this year when volume trading appeared to knock them offline.

The Coinbase website suffered an outage in March when the COVID-19 pandemic was in-play. At that time, Coinbase users were locked out of accounts during the outage triggered by investors' concerns about the global public health crisis. During that session, bitcoin's value dropped more than 20% in less than an hour.