TD Ameritade, Schwab, Vanguard And Fidelity Suffer Brief Outages On Busy Trading Day (#GotBitcoin?)

Some Fidelity and Schwab clients were experiencing difficulties accessing their accounts amid an 800-point drop in the markets.

Fidelity, Schwab say some clients experienced technical issues amid 800-point Dow plunge

Online brokers Fidelity and Charles Schwab experienced technical difficulties that coincided with the 800-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the open Monday.

Both brokers told CNBC about an hour after the open that the issues had been resolved.

Fidelity clients took to Twitter to air their concerns about the technical issues.

“Due to higher-than-usual volumes, some clients may have experienced delays in accessing some online features as the market opened but our systems are fine and up and running,” Schwab Public Relations told CNBC. Schwab manages about $4 trillion in assets.

“Some clients are experiencing technical issues and we are working as quickly as possible to resolve,” Fidelity told CNBC shortly after the open. Privately held Fidelity, the largest online broker, manages about $7.8 trillion in client assets for nearly 30 million clients.

TD Ameritade customers also experienced “some slowness in the reporting of trade confirmations this morning related to heavy trade volumes at the open,” the broker told CNBC. TD Ameritade has about $1.4 trillion in client assets.

Fidelity clients took to Twitter to air their concerns about the technical issues. ” it would be great on a day like today if your site worked,” said one Twitter user.

Many photos on Twitter showed that Fidelity’s platform was telling its clients their account balance was $0.00. Schwab’s app was flashing a “temporarily unavailable” message, according to photos on Twitter.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 800 points as the number of coronavirus cases outside China surged, raising fears of a prolonged global economic slowdown from the spreading deadly virus. The Dow’s drop was the third-largest one-day decline by the 30-stock index in the past three years.

Updated: 3-6-2020

Robinhood Trading Site Seizes Up, Customers Miss Stock Rally

Online brokerage platform Robinhood suffered an outage that lasted the entire U.S. trading day and prevented customers from making trades as stocks surged after last week’s rout.

The system-wide issue began as the markets opened with clients unable to access their accounts. Almost two hours later, Robinhood Markets Inc. said the problem had been identified and its staff was working on a fix. By 4 p.m. in New York, access had not been restored.

We are still experiencing system-wide issues. Our team is continuing to work to resolve this and we’ll provide updates as they become available.

We apologize again for the trouble this has caused and appreciate your patience with us as we work to resume service.

— Robinhood Help (@AskRobinhood) March 2, 2020

We are still experiencing system-wide issues. Our team is continuing to work to resolve this and we’ll provide updates as they become available.

We apologize again for the trouble this has caused and appreciate your patience with us as we work to resume service.

Clients blasted the closely held company on social media and several said they would close their accounts. “One of the most anticipated trading days and your service is down at market open,” one user wrote. Another user said: “What is going on — I can’t do any trades — you will lose me as customer going forward. This is ridiculous.”

Robinhood is gonna lose 4-5 million users because of this horrible situation your putting Investor’s & traders into. We can’t trade our money or have access to our money. This is a critical time in the markets and you guys FAILED to execute. I need to hear a response

— EMoney (@E_AllTheWay) March 2, 2020

The failure was a setback for a Silicon Valley startup that has sought to lure young, tech-savvy investors who want to trade entirely online. Founded in 2013, the Menlo Park, California company made a name for itself by offering commission-free trading on a mobile app. Since then, it has garnered millions of customers and a valuation of $7.6 billion.

Financial technology companies may have difficulty dealing with higher trading volume in more volatile markets, said Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. “Particularly, is the technology scalable enough to handle the amount of orders they’re getting?” he said.

Recently, much larger competitors including Charles Schwab Corp. and Fidelity Investments have dropped some trading fees, essentially matching Robinhood’s offering. Companies including Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc. have also started offering the ability to trade stocks for free.

U.S. stocks surged the most in 14 months on Monday as investors gained confidence that central banks would intervene to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus. Last week, the S&P 500 Index suffered the worst week for the benchmark since 2008.

During the market decline, Fidelity and Schwab customers experienced technical issues that were quickly repaired.

Updated: 3-9-2020

Robinhood Crypto And Stock Trading App Is Down Second Monday In A Row

After experiencing a major outage last week, major stock and cryptocurrency trading app Robinhood is troubled again.

Robinhood encountered another technical outage on Monday, causing its platform to halt trading services, according to a March 9 tweet by Robinhood’s support team.

Robinhood Partially Fixes The Outage After An Hour Of Downtime

The firm announced earlier on the day:

“Trading is currently down on Robinhood and we’re investigating the issue. We’re focused on getting back up and running as soon as possible and we’ll update the status page with the latest.”

Subsequently, Robinhood has partially restored trading, noting that they are working to get the platform back up and running fully. According to online reports, the platform was partly functional after just an hour of downtime.

As of press time, Robinhood app is still experiencing issues with equities, options and cryptocurrency trading, according to Robinhood’s status page. According to the website, Robinhood has already identified the issue and implemented necessary measures to fix the problem, while those trading services are experiencing “degraded performance.”

A User From Florida Reportedly Filed A Federal Class Lawsuit Against Robinhood

The latest outage on Robinhood follows a major technical problem that happened last week. As reported by Cointelegraph, the day-long outage on March 2 purportedly caused Robinhood users to miss out on the biggest one-day point gain in the Dow Jones history, with users apparently planning to start a legal class action against Robinhood.

According to a report by CNBC, a Robinhood client based in Florida filed a federal class lawsuit on March 4. The plaintiff, Travis Taaffe, reportedly alleges that Robinhood breached its contract by failing to “provide a functioning platform,” causing traders to be unable to transfer money while stock markets surged.

Jesse Eberle is a former bond broker at brokerage firm Tradition Securities & Derivatives, who was one of the Robinhood traders that suffered from the outage last week. He noted that the platform started the brokerage war when Robinhood launched zero-fee trading back in 2014. Eberle, who has been a Robinhood user for 20 months to date, predicted that the company will eventually lose the battle as people will shift to more reliable platforms. He said to Cointelegraph:

“They may have started the brokerage war with commission free trading, but I would bet they now end up on the losing side of this battle as people, myself included, will move to more established and reliable platforms. Don’t be surprised if you see a lawsuit or two being lobbed your way as well, Robinhood!”

Robinhood’s customer agreement says that the firm is not responsible for “temporary interruptions”

While some reports claim that Robinhood founders said that they would compensate investors impacted by the outage on a case-by-case basis, the company’s customer agreement outlines that Robinhood will not be responsible for outages on the platform.

The 44-Page Document Reads:

“Although considerable effort is expended to make the Website, App and other operational and communications channels available around the clock, Robinhood does not warrant that these channels will be available and error free every minute of the day. I agree that Robinhood will not be responsible for temporary interruptions in service due to maintenance, Website or App changes, or failures, nor shall Robinhood be liable for extended interruptions due to failures beyond our control, including but not limited to the failure of interconnecting and operating systems, computer viruses, forces of nature, labor disputes and armed conflicts.”

As reported by Cointelegraph, a group of Robinhood clients that were unhappy about the technical outage brought together to create a twitter account in response to the damaging downtime. As of press time, the account has amassed over 7,400 followers. A spokesperson at Robinhood declined to comment on the Twitter initiative to Cointelegraph last week.

Updated: 3-14-2020

Robinhood Outages During Historic Price Action Sparks Heated Community Reaction

“Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder.” At least, that’s what is stated on the website of Robinhood, the popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app. However, the app’s recent outages on March 2 and March 9 have shown that fancy words on landing pages are insufficient to make an application reliable — and now, traders are starting to gang up on Robinhood.

The reason for this turn of events is that on March 2, Robinhood traders were left unable to complete exchange orders and without access to their portfolios or charts as the app suffered a major technical outage that made it inoperable for over a day. Further outages took place on March 9 and March 12, causing traders to call for a class-action lawsuit against the app’s developers in hopes of receiving some kind of compensation.

Three Outrages In Two Weeks

Technical reliability is not Robinhood’s strong suit, and three crashes in under two weeks is unacceptable for an app with over 10 million users — or so hundreds of traders think.

The company states it will be completing a major overhaul of the systems powering the platform, despite the fact that investors and users have shelled out over $900 million for its development. The outage of March 9 left the platform inoperable until 10:25 a.m. EDT, with services being restored at 3:30 p.m. EDT, less than 30 minutes before the markets closed. Even worse, on March 12, users reported that Robinhood was down again — a situation that raised even more questions.

Disgruntled Traders Demand Compensation

The Robinhood team repeatedly issued statements claiming that the company was working hard to fix the issues, and even offered users compensation in the amount of $15. However, traders found this to be insufficient when compared to hundreds and thousands of dollars in losses, and they are complaining that the outages left them missing out on the biggest one-day point gain in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Traders have filed complaints with United States regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and have created a Twitter account — which has over 8,000 followers — as another tool for leverage. As the @ClassRobinhood account’s profile states:

“We are actively building a case against Robinhood for their negligence and late open on March 2, 2020. They have been fined by FINRA before.”

And there is much to be had, as Robinhood controls a significant market share. The platform is valued at $7.6 billion and is well known in the crypto community for taking no commission on transactions. In December 2019, its co-founder Vladimir Tenev revealed that over 200,000 clients had already signed up for its new app for fractional stock trading, which is supposed to be releasing soon.

Do Users Have Anything To Worry About?

Strange as it may seem in light of recent events, Robinhood has historically had the support of the SEC and FINRA. But with Mt. Gox and Coincheck still fresh in the minds of the crypto community, a third outage in a row has made millions of traders fear that Robinhood may not be able to resume operations as they once were.

It appears that users were not only unable to use the platform, but that they couldn’t withdraw their money either. Many of them point to the poor technical expertise of Robinhood and blame its developers in particular. Some have been using the hashtag #LearnToCode to protest on Twitter alongside @RobinhoodClass, which shared:

“We’ve all lost money to Robinhood today. They made the decision to push an update the night before the biggest market day since 2008. They waited 2 hours to announce the outage on social media. People have lost thousands of dollars due to negligence. This is just criminal.”

Meanwhile, some traders have more serious intentions and are threatening to sue Robinhood, or are demanding that regulators fine it. Many people support these threats of lawsuits, with Twitter user @AssadManely bluntly stating, “Let’s start the class action lawsuit.”

In addition, nearly 3,500 people have signed a Change.org petition that calls for Robinhood to be barred from FINRA and banned from any activities related to financial securities. Some have questioned Robinhood’s financial reliability. In one Twitter thread, user @xrp_Prophet wrote:

“Magically, Robinhood can always accept your money, even when the system is ‘down’ Makes me wonder if they EVEN HAVE THE MONEY! Is this another cryptocurrency exchange scam like MtGox??”

However, some experts believe that chances are slim that there was a financial motive — or any intentional misconduct — behind the outages at Robinhood. Pankaj Balaji, the CEO of Delta Exchange, pointed to extra loads caused by high volatility as a possible reason for the outage. He told Cointelegraph:

“The technology needs to be built in a fashion that it is able to distribute the load and handle such spikes. These frequent outages expose the fact that there are issues with Robinhood’s technology and its ability to handle volume spikes in such high volatility environment.”

Anthony Ha, a financial expert and CEO of the trading platform Webull, didn’t believe that financial problems were to blame either:

“This most recent outage has nothing to do with their financials as Robinhood Clearing is very well capitalized. If you are referring to RH drawing from their $200mm revolver, this is a common thing in the clearing world and I do not believe there is a story there.”

More Outages To Come?

Robinhood’s developers are now trying to regain the trust of its users. However, the fear that more outages are an inevitable result of the underlying technological infrastructure’s imperfection has made the community call on the platform to release detailed reports on the state of the system.

In response, the development team released a blog post, in which it identified the cause of the outage as being due to heavy strain on the app’s infrastructure. The unprecedented load caused by high trading volumes led to a “thundering herd” effect that triggered a failure of the platform’s Domain Name System.

The post included further details about other factors, such as highly volatile and historic market conditions, record volume and record account sign-ups that all compiled at the most inopportune moment and led to the crash. However, in a now-deleted tweet, one user claimed that the company’s excuse was just self-glorification of the service’s high demand.

Will Robinhood Take Responsibility?

Although they are signing petitions and engaging in tweetstorms, users who hope to receive any sort of compensation are likely in for a disappointing blow. Robinhood’s legal team has done its homework, as the platform’s customer agreement explicitly states that it is not liable for “temporary interruptions in service due to maintenance, Website or App changes, or failures.”

J.R. Forsyth, the founder of the blockchain project Onfo, believes that although Robinhood traders have good reason to demand compensation for lost profits, they shouldn’t expect to receive anything:

“Any financial broker who has permission to conduct operations with currencies is required to take all measures to maintain the reliability of the service and be prepared for any kind of price fluctuations or high trading volumes. This means that the exchange is fully responsible for the outage. However, traders can expect that compensations will not be paid, because according to the terms and conditions published on the official website of Robinhood, the company is not responsible for such incidents.”

Balaji also shared a similar opinion with Cointelegraph, but added that Robinhood may offer some form of payment to recoup its reputation:

“In order to retain customers Robinhood might offer some kind of benefits to its users. Customers tend to be sticky for a brokerage business and losing them can be tricky as once lost it is very difficult to bring them back.”

Furthermore, according to the terms and conditions published on Robinhood’s website, the platform is not liable for extended interruptions due to failures beyond the company’s control. This, of course, threatens the prospects of any class-action lawsuit.

Jaian Cuttari, the CEO of the financial companies Veltrust and Bdam Foundation, told Cointelegraph that Robinhood’s decision to compensate its traders will depend on the exact extent to which the company was responsible for the outages:

“If it was gross negligence hidden as technical outage then they can be sued for damages. If the company has a solid policy user agreement which states they are not liable for service outages then it would be difficult for users to sue as the agreement acknowledges the company is not liable in certain instances.”

This type of wording in the platform’s documentation may not stop lawyers from launching class-action lawsuits, but if they do, it would most likely only be for their own benefit and not that of the users. Speaking about possible court action, Tal Weiss, the co-founder and chief technology officer of the software analytics company OverOps, pointed out that a wisely drafted agreement can seriously hinder any legal process, adding:

“Class action suits can take years to pursue, and must meet a high legal bar. Given the unique circumstances surrounding the market which are outside the company’s control, this will be a long and hard legal challenge.”

Lawsuits are unlikely to yield any results but may be a nuisance for Robinhood, considering that it is required by FINRA and the SEC to have backup plans on hand in case of temporary interruptions. FINRA also requires “prompt and accurate processing of securities transactions” — a point that lawyers may latch onto.

While it’s not clear whether or not the company will compensate its users for their losses beyond the $15 it has already offered — or if it will be fined by regulators — Robinhood is certainly losing the trust of traders, which may lead to thousands of users leaving the platform. Balaji predicted that once Robinhood is up and running once again, users may withdraw their funds and shift to other brokers. He added:

“This would be a double whammy as not only will Robinhood lose customers but it will also lose good quality capital which will create a strain on its balance sheet.”

Updated: 4-20-2020

Crypto Trading App Robinhood Reportedly Seeks $250M After March Outages

Robinhood reportedly saw record revenue growth amid the coronavirus pandemic, anonymous sources reveal.

Popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app had a lot of problems in March, and is reportedly trying to make up for it with help from a new injection of cash.

According to Bloomberg, Robinhood is in the process of raising $250 million at a valuation of about $8 billion. Citing anonymous sources, the report says the new funding round will be driven by Robinhood’s existing investors, like major venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

The word is that there’s still no final deal. Cointelegraph contacted Robinhood for comment and didn’t receive an immediate response. We will update this story if they should provide one.

The report also notes that Robinhood has seen record revenue growth during the coronavirus pandemic, up from $20 million in March 2019 to $60 million March 2020. There was a significant surge in new account signups in the midst of market volatility.

The March 2 outage was not the only technical issue experienced by Robinhood that month. On March 9, the platform suffered another system outage, causing downtime for several services on its platform. A group of affected users filed a class action lawsuit against the company on March 25, accusing the platform of leaving its users able to execute trades on securities or change limit orders.

Robinhood’s reported funding could be crucial in winning back the trust of users affected by the company’s outages, as well as handling ongoing legal issues stemming from those outages. As reported, Robinhood started compensating some of its users in mid-March, but declined to say how many users were affected.

 Updated: 6-18-2020

Robinhood Temporarily Down For The Count

User-friendly stock and crypto trading app, Robinhood, has reported its services are down.

Robinhood, a stock and crypto trading application known for its mainstream appeal and simplicity, recently reported significant platform outages.

Robinhood announced “experiencing a major outage in equities and options trading, as well as degraded performance in cryptocurrency trading” on June 18, a Reuters report detailed.

Reuters reported a note on Robinhood’s website, stating: “We’re currently experiencing issues with our services and are investigating the issue.” By press time, however, Cointelegraph staff could not locate such a statement on Robinhood’s page.

Robinhood Appeals To The Masses

Robinhood offers the public a simple avenue into the stock and crypto investment world. The platform touts no fees. Over the last couple of years, the platform has added various cryptocurrencies to its platform, pushing the industry further into the mainstream.

Robinhood, as well as other similar platforms, have seen an influx of activity and users recently, a June 12 CNBC report detailed.

This outage is not the first of its kind for Robinhood. The retail-friendly platform has suffered multiple other difficulties this year, included an outage just a few months ago.

Updated: 8-31-2020

Robinhood, Other Online Trading Platforms Having Log-in Issues

Customers reported experiencing issues logging into Robinhood, Charles Schwab and multiple other trading platforms Monday morning, according to a flurry of tweets.

* CoinDesk confirmed the degraded performance on Robinhood via the website’s status page. The popular retail trading platform posted a notice saying, “Some users are experiencing issues with delayed order status updates. These are display issues only, and should not impact order execution. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”

* Issues on TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab have also been detected over the past few hours by downdetector.com.

* On Twitter, Charles Schwab said its website may be “intermittently inaccessible for some clients” due to “a technical issue” resulting in possibly longer-than-usual hold times.

* U.S. consumer protection agencies have received more than 400 complaints about Robinhood from its users during the first half of 2020, according to a Bloomberg report, roughly four times the amount of complaints filed about its competitors.

* At 17:02 UTC, Robinhood emailed CoinDesk noting that the delayed order status issues were resolved and Robinhood is operational.

Updated: 11-9-2020

Traders Frustrated By Online Brokerage Outages As Stocks Surge

Websites crashed, live prices failed to load and trades took longer than expected in the wake of positive news about a Covid-19 vaccine.

Several online trading platforms around the world broke down or were unavailable on Monday as individual investors tried to take advantage of heavy trading after the announcement of positive data from a Covid-19 vaccine candidate.

More than 85% of S&P 500 companies climbed and shares in industries beleaguered by the pandemic — ranging from travel to leisure — shot up on optimism about a vaccine that prevented more than 90% of symptomatic infections in a trial of tens of thousands of volunteers.

The glitches were the latest instance this year of online platforms freezing up just as non-professional traders turned to them during times of market turmoil. In early March, Robinhood Markets’s platform was offline for an entire trading day during the tumultuous time early in coronavirus outbreak. Then in September, Robinhood and Charles Schwab Corp. crashed in the wake of Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc. stock splits.

Jack Stevens, 30, in London hoped to move some money before the U.S. markets opened on Monday. But when he tried logging into his account at AJ Bell Plc, a Manchester-based online stock platform, he was greeted with an unexpected obstacle: a logo that kept spinning but wouldn’t let him access the roughly 18,000 pounds ($23,600) he was hoping to allocate at least in part toward U.S. investments.

An AJ Bell spokesman said the company was dealing with “intermittent service issues with the platform this afternoon which we have been working hard to fix as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

As the markets were surging, U.S. investors reported glitches at Vanguard Group, TD Ameritrade Holding Corp., Fidelity Investments, Robinhood and Merrill Lynch. In the U.K., similar issues surfaced at AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown Plc and the IG Group Holdings Plc. Problems ranged from delays in charts and pricing to downed sites and inaccessible accounts.

“We are experiencing our busiest-ever day for web and app traffic, and as a consequence some intermittent service issues,” Hargreaves Lansdown spokesman Danny Cox said in an emailed statement.

Those service issues caused a headache for Andy Dickson, who lives near Glasgow and works in marketing at a financial-services firm. He has been dealing throughout the day with technical hiccups on his Hargreaves Lansdown account.

Dickson did manage to log into his account, but because of delays on the platform, found out he ended up trading several thousand pounds’ worth of the same stock three times.

“It doesn’t provide me with the greatest amount of confidence,” he said.

Updated: 11-20-2020

Poloniex Exchange Goes Down On The Brink Of New Bitcoin All-Time High

When all eyes are on Bitcoin, exchanges sometimes suffer difficulties.

With a new all-time price high in sight for Bitcoin, crypto exchange Poloniex recently went offline.

“Poloniex is currently unavailable due to an unexpected issue,” the exchange’s customer support Twitter page said on Friday. “We are investigating the issue and will keep you updated here throughout.”

Bitcoin has yielded exuberant upward price action in recent weeks, as well as catching growing attention. When traffic becomes dense on exchanges, their systems sometimes go down, locking out traders. This has happened with other exchanges in the past as well, including BitMEX and Coinbase.

“Poloniex is now out of maintenance mode,” Poloniex posted in a follow-up tweet. “Our spot and margin markets are in post-only mode and withdrawals are temporarily unavailable.” A subsequent update stated the return of futures contract trading on the platform.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin remains painfully close to its all-time price high near $20,000. This year has seen a significant amount of mainstream financial attention on the asset. Paul Tudor Jones, Jack Dorsey’s Square and MicroStrategy have all jumped on board, buying big positions in the digital coin.

Cointelegraph reached out to Poloniex for additional details, but received no response as of press time. This article will be updated accordingly should a response come in.

Updated: 11-23-2020

Bitcoin Go Up, Coinbase Go Down: Exchange Outages And Trader Outrage

Coinbase has suffered multiple outages since March, often coinciding with volatile Bitcoin trading days.

Coinbase appears to have a capacity problem. Users have pointed out for years that when Bitcoin and other crypto assets are especially volatile, the exchange sometimes goes offline without warning. These outages can prevent customers from buying or selling their crypto assets and are generally viewed unfavorably by traders.

Between March and November, the exchange recorded nine different issues leading to various types of outages or connectivity problems, although direct customer impact is somewhat unclear in some of the instances. The issues seemingly range in their degree of severity. The main status update posted by Coinbase during such times is: “Coinbase.com is experiencing connectivity issues.”

Four of these instances coincided with volatile Bitcoin price action, according to 30-minute price candles on TradingView.com.

On April 29, Coinbase reported connectivity issues. In an update to its status that was posted later, Coinbase.com appeared to have suffered issues between 10:00 am and 12:30 pm PDT on that day. Bitcoin’s price moved 4.54% during that time window. Cointelegraph previously reported on platform difficulties seen on that day.

On May 9, Coinbase notified the public of another difficulty, again stating: “Coinbase.com is experiencing connectivity issues.” This time, Bitcoin’s price moved 15.26% between 5:00 pm and 6:00 pm PDT — the time window showing difficulties, based on the status, which also included added details published several days after.

Coincidence that everytime we have huge market moves @coinbase shuts down? @SEC_Enforcement seriously investigate this is fishy. We need some transparency on this

— Alex Cobb (@AlexCobb_) May 10, 2020

The third instance correlating with notable Bitcoin price action happened on June 1, when Coinbase once again notified the public of connectivity issues. This incident seemingly impacted users on some level between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm PDT, during which time Bitcoin moved 6.94% in price.

The days following this particular incident saw some Coinbase customers leave the platform, judging by Bitcoin withdrawals and reported by Cointelegraph on June 9.

Coinbase also suffered another connectivity issue on July 28 between 2:00 am and 4:30 am PDT, during which Bitcoin moved 3.82% in price.

Not all of Coinbase’s issues have coincided with major BTC price swing days, however. Coinbase notified the public of issues on Nov. 16, stating: “Website and mobile apps not loading.” Bitcoin only moved roughly 1.72% in price during the stated time window of the problems, although it was enough to provoke more outrage within the trading community.

Connectivity issues also occurred on May 28, July 17, Aug. 18 and Nov. 11, during which Bitcoin moved less than 3% in price during each incident.

Coinbase down AGAIN. At this point I adamantly encourage everyone to stop using Coinbase.

They’ve had years and endless resources to prepare for this. To me, it’s no coincidence this stuff happens, and it’s very shady

Delete Coinbase

— Dan | CCV | ⚡️ (@cryptorecruitr) November 17, 2020

Coinbase did not respond to questions regarding its outages. However, the firm’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, tweeted that Coinbase aimed to fix the issues.

We’re working hard to add additional capacity (both in servers and customer support) to deal with increased traffic. Thank you for your patience during this time. And thank you to the team at Coinbase working hard to serve our customers! Bull runs can be exciting and stressful.

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) November 18, 2020

Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX also has a history of performance issues during large Bitcoin price swings.

Updated: 11-26-2020

Coinbase Warns Users Of Connectivity Issues Due To Amazon AWS Outage

The U.S.-based exchange has told users that they may experience some intermittent delays or errors while transacting.

It’s not the first time there’s been a disruption.

Exchanges have had problems coinciding with rapid price increases throughout the past year: On June 1, Coinbase experienced a fivefold increase in traffic over four minutes when Bitcoin reached the $10,000 milestone. About three months later, when the currency broke the $12,000 barrier, trading was temporarily halted.

Trading was also disabled on Oct. 5, Oct. 20 and Oct. 27. In response, Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong tweeted that the company would be adding capacity — servers and customer support — to deal with increased traffic.

On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the company didn’t have an update beyond saying that it’s still investigating the outage. Last month, the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange said it has filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public.

Binance, another popular exchange, has also experienced disruptions previously that were disclosed by CEO Changpeng Zhao on Twitter. Like Armstrong, he promised to add more server capacity in response to the downtime. Binance wasn’t experiencing an outage on Thursday.

“As platforms grow, we are bound to encounter teething issues,” Zhao said in November. “We do work very hard to try to prevent or minimize them, but I believe all exchanges will face system issues over time.”

Updated: 1-10-2020

Think How Well Bitcoin Would Be Doing If You Could Actually Buy It

For all the talk about bitcoin (and broadly crypto) being easier to buy than ever before, Friday morning, as bitcoin was topping $41,000 per coin, I spent hours trying to make a small $100 purchase.

According to some, the latest rally was initiated by institutional investors looking for a hedge against fiat inflation and the U.S. dollar’s decline in foreign exchange markets, and they seem to be having no problem buying – the price has shot up $20,000 in less than a month.

But if my experience is an example of what other retail investors are dealing with, there’s still plenty of frustration to be had with the crypto markets. And think how much higher the price could be if all these newbie investors could get their hands on some of that sweet, sweet digital gold.

Transaction Declined

This maddening adventure into purchasing more bitcoin to hodl started not as panic that I was going to miss out; no, I’ve been in the space since late 2012, and have seen the majority of the bull runs and bear markets. I am in no hurry to buy at the top.

But I was using this revival as a time to set up recurring purchases with these mainstream mobile apps that are touting easy crypto buying as the technology matures.

I started with Square’s Cash App, an application I’ve used plenty, loading money into my account to then take advantage of the boosts, like $1 off any coffee-shop purchase. But when trying to set up a bi-weekly purchase of bitcoin, I got the “something went wrong” error message. What, though!? What the hell went wrong!? (Stock purchases were also declined.)

OK, no problem, I’ve had a Coinbase account for many years and have purchased crypto with that account, so that should be an easy buy. Except that it wasn’t. After updating my card details from an old debit card, I put in a buy order that was promptly declined.

For Fuck’s Sake

Next I tried Blockchain.com, what was probably my first bitcoin wallet ever, besides a paper wallet. That transaction was denied based on my residence being in New York where they don’t operate (thanks a lot, BitLicense).

How about Gemini, then, where just a couple weeks ago, I purchased some DeFi tokens. On the first try, the purchase was declined because the market moved, so the displayed price had changed. I tried again – begrudgingly, because the fees on a $100 transaction were nearly $6.50 – and a couple seconds later received an email, “Success! Your buy order is complete.”

Finally! Except, wait, nope, 30 minutes later I received another email stating the transfer failed and the buy order was not completed.

Maybe all these services are overwhelmed by demand? Both Coinbase and Kraken suffered outages this week during the run.

Robinhood was next. I was instructed to deposit money into my account before I could buy, but after putting my routing and account number in, the app stated my financial institution is not supported (Robinhood seems to be using Plaid for connecting bank accounts).

Binance.US? Didn’t work, either, again on the basis of not doing business with customers residing in New York. I tried inputting my parent’s address in the Midwest, which allowed me a first level of verification, but to buy bitcoin, you need to go through the advanced verification, requiring a picture of a bank statement or utility bill.

My driver’s license still shows my former Midwest address, but that wasn’t a sufficient form of verification at this stage.

Lastly, it dawned on me that PayPal just began allowing crypto purchases, so I logged into my account. While a button on the homepage said “Discover Bitcoin,” when I clicked it, it took me to my dashboard, which had no clear way to buy bitcoin.

By this time, I was fuming and called a friend to have them check their ability to purchase. He was able to buy in seconds.

So now, I’m thinking that I’m on some kind of blacklist; maybe harping on how banks suck and crypto companies that play by traditional finance’s rules are selling out has finally caught up with me.

But after some troubleshooting, I realized it was because my PayPal account is a business account (pretty arbitrarily really), so I went through the process of setting up a separate individual account, which I had to link to a random, burner email account.

From that individual account dashboard, the “buy bitcoin” button was right up front and so I put through an order, and received a note that my transaction had gone through.

But for anyone not interested in carrying out all these different setups for the story, this kind of process is infuriating, and I’d assume any novice crypto buyer would have given up after the second rejection.

The Main Problem

Which brings me to what appears to be the real issue – my traditional financial institution.

I bank with a state credit union in Colorado and after trying these various routes to “financial freedom,” I called their customer service line. I’ve had to call them before to open up payments applications, such as Zelle, so I figured I’d just need to tell them to take the blocks off my account (I’ve bought crypto in the past using this bank-branded debit card).

But after being on hold, the customer service agent tells me all crypto transactions are “considered very high risk” and declines them, no matter whether I assure them it’s a transaction I want to make or not.

She told me to contact each of the companies directly and see if there was another way to make a purchase – for instance, I could maybe pay directly out of my checking account – but when trying to input my account details before, the credit union didn’t seem to be supported.

This new risk aversion to anything crypto-related is strange. The Bitcoin industry has matured substantially and in many enthusiasts’ eyes, running towards $50,000 per coin means the incumbents, the status quo, the powers that be, have no choice but to take us seriously now.

That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Instead, I’m refreshing my bank account portal every 15 minutes because that PayPal transaction – it’s still pending.

Updated: 1-17-2021

Coinbase Redoing Infrastructure To Prevent Outages During Peak Times

The exchange also said it’s working to improve its customer service response time, another source of complaints.

Coinbase will break apart certain parts of its Coinbase.com and app infrastructure in a bid to keep the cryptocurrency exchange from going down during periods of high volume.

During the recent bitcoin bull run, Coinbase has struggled to keep itself up during stretches of heavy volume, leading to snarky comments on Twitter and Reddit that it’s only news when the exchange doesn’t go down during peak periods. Given the exchange has filed preliminary documents for a public listing of the company’s shares, fixing its infrastructure has undoubtedly taken on an even greater urgency.

According to an updated Jan. 8 post mortem on the Jan. 6-7 outages, Coinbase said it will break its “monolithic” backend into “discrete” parts in order to limit individual parts breaking and taking down the whole system.

“We are further decomposing our monolithic application server into separate discrete services. This will allow us to have different scaling profiles for different sections of our API surface that receive heterogeneous load,” the exchange said in the blog. “In addition, this will reduce the blast radius if we have issues in any one surface, as it will only affect the APIs or functionality that it is responsible for.”

Coinbase specifically cited record breaking exchange volumes on Jan. 7 that were “easily 6x what had already been an elevated steady-state request rate.”

The exchange said trading and buying was still available during this period, but other dependencies related to the function limited the apps functionality.

In another blog, Coinbase’s customer service desk apologized for “delays in response time,” another source of frequent complaint on the internet. The exchange committed to hiring more team members, rolling out a chat feature with customer support along with being more vocal on major social media accounts.

The two blogs follow a Jan. 12 blog apologizing to UK and EU customers for system outages and trading restrictions.

Updated: 3-9-2021

Blockchain.com Crypto Wallet Outage Affects ‘Large Number’ of Users

The outage was resolved roughly seven hours after publication of this article, according to the firm’s status page.

Crypto wallet firm Blockchain.com announced Tuesday it is experiencing an outage that has impacted “a large number of customers.” The company, which recently raised $120 million, is currently investigating the issue.

In a follow-up tweet, Blockchain.com told its customers, “please rest assured your funds are secure.”

As of 13:37 UTC, the outage was still listed on Blockchain.com’s status page.

Updated: 5-19-2021

Many Crypto Exchanges Are Reporting Issues Amid Extreme Market Volatility

Coinbase was down, Gemini reported degraded performance and CoinMarketCap was inaccessible earlier on Wednesday.

As the price of Bitcoin (BTC) dove to prices not seen since February, site traffic on major crypto exchanges and websites have surged, seemingly causing outages, intermittent access and slower loading times.

Earlier on Wednesday, users of Coinbase and Binance experienced delays in Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 token withdrawals “due to congestion on the Ethereum network,” according to the status pages of both major cryptocurrency exchanges.

Purportedly for the same reason, Coinbase users still have only intermittent access to the website and mobile app while crypto analytics site CoinMarketCap and crypto exchange Kraken both briefly went down, leaving crypto users unable to check market activity and trade during a critical time.

Meanwhile, Gemini reported at 2:27 pm UTC that it would be taking emergency maintenance actions to correct ongoing issues.

The exchange said that “All customer accounts and funds remain completely secure.”

Coinbase has gone offline several times during major Bitcoin price moves, leaving many users unable to access their portfolios.

Though the exchange reported that users’ funds were safe, outages on any exchange during huge downturns or price surges can hurt traders wanting to buy or sell. Losses can mount when users aren’t able to access their accounts to sell their cryptocurrency, and potential profits can simply disappear when they can’t buy anything.

In what could be described as the crypto bloodbath of 2021 — referencing the March 2020 market downturn, in which the price of BTC dipped to the $3,000s overnight — major token prices have fallen significantly. At the time of publication, BTC is $35,642, having dropped more than 17% in the last 24 hours, while ETH has dropped 25%, almost dipping under $2,000 earlier on Wednesday. Nearly every token project is experiencing double-digit percentage drops in an extremely volatile crypto market.

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