Coinbase Suffers Major System-Wide Outage As Bitcoin Price Slides Toward $61,000

Continuing a trend established years ago, America’s top crypto exchange, Coinbase, disclosed Tuesday that it had been hit with a system-wide outage, upsetting customers who are concerned about their investments amid a Bitcoin price correction. 

Coinbase Battles With Major Outage

Coinbase informed users of the outage in a post on X, indicating that it was investigating the issue and working on a solution. The firm said on its official status page that the “major outage” started at 4:15 AM UTC on May 14. “Your funds are safe,” the company added.

Any attempts to access the Coinbase website displayed a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” note.

Coinbase and multiple other crypto exchanges encountered brief outages in late February from a rapid increase in cryptocurrency trading activity following a Bitcoin flash crash that saw the maiden crypto drop over 10% before rebounding. The exchange also experienced a glitch in March amid heavy crypto trading, including showing some customers had $0 balances.

According to the Coinbase status page, the exchange fixed the outage issue at approximately 7:42 UTC. However, some customers might still experience “degraded transactions,” which involve failures when transferring crypto assets or withdrawing fiat.

These latest technical troubles come as Bitcoin’s price heads south. BTC plunged from $62,700 to $61,490 in the space of minutes, marking a 1.8% fall on the day. The crypto has since recovered slightly to $61,821 as of publication time. Nonetheless, Bitcoin has lost roughly $1,506 from yesterday’s intraday peak of $63,339, according to CoinGecko data.

Suffice it to say that Coinbase has regularly struggled with outages during periods of high market volatility. So regular is this development that some traders consider Coinbase crashes as one of the signs of an incoming meteoric BTC bull run.