Crypto wallet Coinbase goes offline, leaving customers unable to trade

Customers who visited the site in the afternoon reported they were unable to reach Coinbase and its professional-level service Coinbase Pro online. An error message blamed “connection issues” and reassured users that their funds were safe. 

Users started submitting outage reports about Coinbase just after 3:00 p.m. ET, according to the Internet activity tracking service Downdetector. Coinbase’s confirmed the outage on Twitter, saying that it is “all hands on deck to get this resolved as soon as possible,” while acknowledging that customer trades and transactions may be delayed. 

After around 90 minutes, the outage seemed to start dissipating.

Coinbase previously went offline in May amid a huge influx of traffic, contributing to Bitcoin prices tumbling. The company had also suffered frequent outages in 2017 because of technical problems.

The latest outage comes as the Shiba Inu coin reached an all-time high on Wednesday of $0.00005478, up 777% in the past 30 days. Twitter users blamed the boom market for the dog-theme cryptocurrency for the Coinbase outage, though Coinbase didn’t give a reason.

The impact on traders can be significant when their brokerages or crypto wallets go offline. In May 2020, online brokerage Robinhood suffered a two-day outage, causing some customers to lose money, including one who said he had lost $52,000 after being unable to trade on one of the year’s most volatile trading days. Customers demanded that Robinhood compensate them and filed a class action lawsuit against the company. The financial industry’s self-regulatory body, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, fined Robinhood $70 million for previous outages and other infractions.

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