Bitfinex goes offline—yet again

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Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex went offline on Thursday for over two hours, halting trading on its platform and leaving traders in the dark. The crypto exchange has gone offline in the past and coincidentally, it’s usually at a time when the market is seeing heightened activity.

The controversial exchange first announced the outage at 07:43 UTC, stating on its status page, “We are investigating issues with the platform and have to temporarily halt trading. We will keep everyone updated […] as we know more. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

We are investigating issues with the platform and have to temporarily halt trading. We will keep everyone updated on here and our status page https://t.co/u3pYCVVGQq as we know more.
We apologise for the inconvenience.

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) September 30, 2021

Two hours later at 09:49 UTC, the exchange revealed that it had made progress with its technical issue, and it would be back online soon.

“Our intervention is nearing successful completion and the Bitfinex platform will be returning in view-only mode at 9:55 AM UTC. Starting from 10:00 AM UTC, it will be possible to cancel orders before trading opens at 10:05 AM UTC. Thank you for your patience.”

At press time, all its systems are operational, from web server and trading engine to backend workers and web sockets.

Bitfinex has yet to give any explanation on what was behind the sudden outage. Several users took to social media to call the exchange out for this, with many noting the coincidence that it went down when the market was on the uptrend.

“How many times offline when the market is pumping?” one user posed.

The last time Bitfinex went offline was on July 1 when, just as in the most recent outage, it halted trading without offering any explanation for it. A similar script transpired in August last year.

Exchange outages have become a pain point for traders, with some losing hefty amounts of money as they are unable to close their trading positions. As a result, some traders have sued exchanges, with one of the biggest being a group that’s suing Binance for an outage back in May.

https://twitter.com/binanceclaim/status/1431050362673242116

Binance Claims, as the group is known, is bankrolled by Swiss private equity firm Liti Capital and claims that the outage led to over $100 million in losses for traders.

Follow CoinGeek’s Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the stream of groups—a from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift, Coinbase, Ripple and Ethereum—who have co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naïve (and even experienced) players in the market.