At 4:30 AM (UTC+0) on May 14, 2024, Coinbase posted on Twitter (also known as X) that the exchange was experiencing a system-wide outage and that an investigation was underway to resolve the issue. They reassured users that their funds remained safe.
Coinbase is experiencing a system wide outage. We are investigating this issue and working on a solution. Please see https://t.co/a3pl4WiDhZ for updates. Your funds are safe.
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 14, 2024
Two hours later, Coinbase announced that some services had been restored, but many customers could not access the exchange. Additionally, users encountered numerous errors when using Coinbase features, such as transferring crypto from Coinbase to a wallet or being unable to withdraw funds. This sparked concerns and suspicions among users about the cause of the outage.
After another hour, Coinbase announced that the entire exchange had been restored, and users could resume normal operations. However, users reported persistent issues that required further resolution.
This was not the first time Coinbase experienced such errors. On February 28 of this year, some users saw their account balances drop to zero and encountered errors when buying or selling. Coinbase attributed this incident to a surge in traffic caused by Bitcoin’s price increase since November 2021, which could have disrupted services.
Apps are now recovering.
We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load tested it. This exceeded that number.
It’s expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we’ll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions, and killing any remaining bottlenecks. Thank you for… https://t.co/JXVppV57AF
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) February 28, 2024
There have been no further announcements from Coinbase after their declaration that all services had resumed.
