Coinbase suffered a significant outage on Sunday, leaving users in the lurch, unable to withdraw their funds for six hours.
It was discovered that issues with the electronic system facilitating online bank transfers in the U.S. were behind the outage.
A Six-Hour Outage
Coinbase users on Sunday were unable to conduct U.S. bank account transactions for six hours on Sunday, following a major outage. Coinbase acknowledged the outage, updating users on its status site, stating,
“We are currently unable to take payments or make withdrawals involving U.S. bank accounts. Our team is aware of this issue and is working on getting everything back to normal as soon as possible.”
The outage was due to an issue within the Automated Clearing House Network which is used for transfers between bank accounts in the country. The problem was identified by the Coinbase team, with the issue being resolved by 12:41 PM. During the outage, users were still able to purchase assets using a debit card or through their PayPal account. However, they were unable to make withdrawals to a U.S. bank account.
User Funds Safe
The exchange has over 103 million users, but the number of users with U.S. bank accounts is unclear. The exchange reassured all its users that their funds were safe after the outage, which left many users in the dark about the status of their transactions.
“We’re currently experiencing technical issues creating ACH transfers. Rest assured, your funds are safe. Our team will provide an update here and on our Status Page when full functionality resumes.”
Troubles Mount For Coinbase
While outages may present significant troubles for the exchange, Coinbase also seems to be having a tumultuous time in the markets as well. Coinbase’s share price plummeted by 9% on Thursday after Wells Fargo issued a profitability warning regarding the exchange. Coinbase has seen increasing pressure thanks to intense competition from FTX and Binance, with both eating into the exchange’s market share, according to a note written by equity analysts Jeff Cantrell, Amid Patel, and Griffin MacMaster.
They also added that with the SEC discussing identifying crypto as a security, it is possible that regulation would pose a serious challenge to the exchange. According to data from TradingView, Coinbase is down by over 2%, trading at around $63 per share.
A Weekend Of Outages
The Coinbase outage wasn’t the only outage to take place this weekend. Earlier, the Solana blockchain also suffered a major outage thanks to a glitch, leading to the network being down for over six hours on Saturday. The downtime crippled the Solana network, with DeFi apps in particular impacted, thanks to their reliance on constant connection with other protocols in the crypto space.
Trading protocol Mango Markets was one such affected party and was unable to handle liquidations or receive margin deposits. This impacted at least one long contract worth nearly $2.5 million. According to Solana’s own status history, the network was finally restarted and restored but has suffered 12 significant outages in 2022 alone. Despite the serious nature of the outage, SOL, Solana’s native token, remained unaffected by the outage.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
