Coinbase Resolves ‘Zero Balance’ Glitch

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has rectified a technical glitch that caused users’ account balances to disappear.

Apps are now recovering.

We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load tested it. This exceeded that number.

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… https://t.co/JXVppV57AF

— Brian Armstrong ?️ (@brian_armstrong) February 28, 2024

According to the company’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, the issue arose amid a “massive” influx of users. During this period, market participants were unable to buy or sell assets.

As per the platform status monitoring site, Coinbase’s issues began on February 28 at around 13:00 Kyiv (14:00 MSK). The error was resolved only after 12 hours. 

“We had modeled a ~10x surge in traffic and load tested it. […] It’s expensive to keep services over-provisioned, but we’ll need to keep working on auto-scaling solutions and eliminating any remaining bottlenecks,” wrote the head of the exchange after operations resumed.

The Coinbase outage coincided with a rapid increase in Bitcoin’s price to $64,000, accompanied by high liquidation volumes. According to Coinglass, positions worth $800 million were forcibly closed in the past 24 hours. 

At the time of writing, the price of the leading cryptocurrency stands at $62,800 with a trading volume of $100 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Back in October 2023, Binance temporarily suspended withdrawals due to technical issues.