Coinbase Reveals Cause of Widespread Crypto Trading Blackout

June 08, 2020

The digital currency exchange Coinbase has released a post mortem on its June 1st outage that affected all of the firm’s trading platforms as well as its mobile applications just as Bitcoin hit $10,000.

The US-based crypto exchange says in a new blog post that a 5x traffic surge in a span of four minutes, spurred by Bitcoin’s sudden rise in value, created an autoscaling issue that led to the saturation of web servers.

“The traffic spike affected a number of our internal services increasing latency between services.

This led to process saturation of the web servers responsible for our API, where the number of incoming requests was greater than the number of listening processes, causing the requests to either be queued and timeout, or fail immediately. Our request error rate spiked to 50%, causing customers to experience errors when interacting with coinbase.com and our mobile apps.”

Coinbase redeployed its application programming interface (API) at 16:20 PDT to support the increased traffic, but the deployment of the software then interfered with the rotation of previous deployments which resulted to another two-minute outage.

The crypto exchange says it is working on solutions to minimize outages due to network congestion.

“We’re working on reducing the impact of price-related traffic spikes through pre-scaling and caching. Longer term, we’re planning to improve our deployment process to mitigate some of the autoscaling issues.”

A few days before the Bitcoin halving, Bitcoin went from almost $10,000 to $8,000 in a matter of hours, causing users to share screenshots of their 502 error messages with the hashtag #Coinbase on Twitter.

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