Right when trading is at it’s most feverish, with bitcoin volume skyrocketing over the past week and now starting to correct itself, bitcoin exchange Bitfinex has suffered a severe outage taking down their entire platform indefinitely.
Bitfinex exchange platform brought down indefinitely due to datacenter issues
This article was published more than a year ago. Some information may no longer be current.
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In a worrying tweet, Bitfinex said,
We are not confident in the network stability of our datacenter so we have elected to take trading down for the time being.
— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) June 21, 2016
Several hours prior to that tweet, Bitfinex had already gone down due to what we now know as a network issue with their datacenter. However, due to the datacenter’s continued issues, the bitcoin exchange site has come down again.
Unfortunately it appears that Bitfinex has chosen to keep the exchange offline until the network issues have been completely fixed, which means that they could be down for an unknown amount of time during one of the hottest times to be a trader in bitcoin.
This has ramifications for traders who have bitcoins stuck on the exchange, whose coins are essentially locked-up until Bitfinex comes back online. Traders who could possibly be making money on the volatility are losing out, which is not a vote of confidence for the exchange.
Some have speculated the recent rise in the price of bitcoin has been due to capital flight in China, or possibly due to the upcoming bitcoin halving. Just last week a few exchanges suffered issues trying to fill orders due to the high demand.
Update: The exchange is now back up and trades are live.
