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.
