Coinbase weathered a major technical glitch Wednesday that led some users to see a $0 balance in their accounts just as Bitcoin’s value surpassed $60,000 for the first time since 2021.
Numerous Coinbase users reported login failures and experienced errors in buying and selling around noon Eastern time, the crypto exchange said on its website. The Coinbase team investigated, posting later in the day that the company was seeing improvements in customer login and trading but that because of “continued heightened traffic, some customers may still see errors in receives and with some payment methods.”
“Your assets are safe,” the company said.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, in a post on X, formerly Twitter, said the company had modeled a tenfold surge in traffic and load tested it but that Wednesday’s numbers exceeded that.
“It’s expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we’ll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions, and killing any remaining bottlenecks. Thank you for bearing with us,” he wrote.
The glitch came on a day when the value of Bitcoin spiked by $6,000, according to Yahoo Finance, peaking above $63,000 before closing just north of $61,000.
Bitcoin saw its all-time high above $68,000 in November 2021 but fell to about $16,000 in 2022, in the wake of the FTX collapse.
Trading firms have seen consequences from outages that forced some users to miss out on spikes in value. Robinhood in 2021 paid nearly $70 million to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to settle allegations the company misled customers, among other charges. More than $5 million of that total went to customers who couldn’t trade during a string of outages — notably, in March 2020, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest one-day gain in 11 years.
