Breaking: Coinbase Suffers “System-Wide Outage”

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, is “experiencing a system-wide outage” that has directly impacted its services. Both desktop and mobile platforms of the crypto exchange are not working.

Coinbase Is Down

The reason behind the outage remains unclear as the exchange ensured that it is “investigating this issue.” According to the status page of Coinbase, the outage started at 21:19 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) on 13 May. In the latest update at 23:09 PDT, the exchange noted that "we are continuing to investigate this issue."

Addressing its users, the exchange further noted: “Your funds are 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.

A Platform-Wide Outage

An attempt to visit the Coinbase website shows the message “503 service temporarily unavailable.” According to Mozilla, the server throws a 503 error when it is not ready to handle requests due to overload or maintenance.

Interestingly, the mobile app of the crypto exchange is showing that “planned maintenance [is] in progress,” which is wrong.

Ahhhh, the app is saying this is "planned maintenance." pic.twitter.com/U6bd0NtH2c

The outage even affected the self-custody platform of the exchange, Coinbase Wallet, which is showing the message “something went wrong” and suggesting some unnecessary instructions like forcefully quitting the app and making sure it's updated.

The system-wide outage came when the dollar value of Bitcoin was hovering around $62,000. According to Coinmarketcap, Coinbase handled about $2.4 billion in cryptocurrency trading volume in the last 24 hours, which will definitely take a hit with the ongoing outage.

Coinbase base is one of the reputed cryptocurrency exchanges and is also publicly listed in the United States. The exchange is benefiting extensively from the ongoing bull run in crypto and has generated $1.2 billion in net income on revenue of $1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2024.

The recent outage is not the first for Coinbase. On Feb 28, 2024, Coinbase and several other crypto exchanges suffered a temporary outage triggered by the surge in trading activities. However, system-wide outages are still rare as such incidents diminish user trust in a platform, especially those offering trading services.