Share:

According to Coinbase, the exchange’s autoscaling couldn’t keep up with a 5x traffic spike experienced during a Bitcoin price surge to $10,000.

The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States said its autoscaling was unable to keep up with a huge traffic spike that left many users unable to log in on June 1.

According to a blog posted on June 6 by Coinbase software engineer Michael de Hoog, the exchange experienced a 5x traffic spike over four minutes around 16:05 PDT on June 1, around the time the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was approaching $10,000. 

The software engineer said the exchange’s autoscaling was “unable to keep pace with this dramatic increase in traffic”:

“This traffic spike affected a number of our internal services, increasing latency between services. This led to process saturation of the web servers responsible for our API [application programming interface], where the number of incoming requests was greater than the number of listening processes, causing the requests to either be queued and timeout, or fail immediately. Our request error rate spiked to 50%, causing customers to experience errors when interacting with coinbase.com and our mobile apps.”

Chart

Traffic on Coinbase. Source: Coinbase

Coinbase said it redeployed the API at 16:20 to increase the number of machines dealing with this spike in traffic. Another two-minute outage followed “due to instances saturating and being marked unhealthy” before the exchange was back online.

 

History of outages

Cointelegraph reported last week that Coinbase has gone offline four times in the last three months during major Bitcoin price moves, leaving many users unable to access their portfolios.

However, Crypto Twitter later revealed the problems on the exchange went further back than that. CryptoWhale posted a chart to his 18,000+ followers on June 3 showing how Coinbase had gone offline 11 times in its history during major price moves:

fxsoriginal

Unfortunately, outages during huge downturns or price surges hurt traders wanting to buy and sell the most. Losses can mount when Coinbase users aren’t able to access their accounts to sell their crypto, and potential profits can simply disappear when they can’t buy anything.

 

Will Coinbase go down again?

The exchange said it was working on improvements in response to the June 1 outage. If Coinbase were to experience another traffic spike to the price of Bitcoin suddenly surging or falling, de Hoog said “pre-scaling and caching” would reduce the impact. 

“Longer term we’re planning to improve our deployment process to mitigate some of the autoscaling issues we experienced,” the software engineer said.

Information on these pages contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Markets and instruments profiled on this page are for informational purposes only and should not in any way come across as a recommendation to buy or sell in these assets. You should do your own thorough research before making any investment decisions. FXStreet does not in any way guarantee that this information is free from mistakes, errors, or material misstatements. It also does not guarantee that this information is of a timely nature. Investing in Open Markets involves a great deal of risk, including the loss of all or a portion of your investment, as well as emotional distress. All risks, losses and costs associated with investing, including total loss of principal, are your responsibility. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of FXStreet nor its advertisers.

Join Telegram

Follow us on Telegram

Stay updated of all the news

Join Telegram

Recommended content


Follow us on Telegram

Stay updated of all the news

Join Telegram

Recommended Content

Editors’ Picks

This is why a mere 15% rally in Lido DAO price could be a game-changer for LDO holders

This is why a mere 15% rally in Lido DAO price could be a game-changer for LDO holders

Lido DAO price is following the rest of the market due to the regulatory events that transpired in the last few days. However, the DeFi token is generally unlikely to pursue the path set by any other cryptocurrencies, including the likes of Bitcoin. This might play in favor of LDO.

More Lido News

LINK holders opt to sell as Chainlink price falls by 9% in a week, new investors on the rise

LINK holders opt to sell as Chainlink price falls by 9% in a week, new investors on the rise

Chainlink price, after following the broader market cues, is nearing a key support level that was last visited by the coin in January this year. This has discouraged LINK holders to the point where selling has become a preferred option. However, newer investors are countering this selling by accumulating, preventing a severe decline.

More Chainlink News

Optimism price could rally 50% as network upgrade inspires new wave of OP adoption

Optimism price could rally 50% as network upgrade inspires new wave of OP adoption

Optimism (OP) price appears to have found support after a new buyer congestion zone came into effect to prevent the free fall. Accordingly, the Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) token is trading horizontally, giving bulls time to accumulate OP at affordable rates.

More Optimism News

Binance CEO addresses chat records disclosed by the SEC

Binance CEO addresses chat records disclosed by the SEC

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has issued an internal address to company staff, asking them to focus on work and developing products people can use. The internal memo comes after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed chat records between Binance employees in an attempt to support its case against the largest crypto exchange by trading volume.

More Cryptocurrencies News

Top 3 cryptocurrencies that outperformed Bitcoin, Ethereum this week

Top 3 cryptocurrencies that outperformed Bitcoin, Ethereum this week

The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) crackdown on cryptocurrencies triggered a correction in the prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum and several altcoins with large market capitalization. 

Read full analysis

BTC

ETH

XRP