Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex went offline on Thursday for over two hours, halting trading on its platform and leaving traders in the dark. The crypto exchange has gone offline in the past and coincidentally, it\u2019s usually at a time when the market is seeing heightened activity.<\/p>\n
The controversial exchange first announced the outage at 07:43 UTC, stating on its status page, \u201cWe are investigating issues with the platform and have to temporarily halt trading. We will keep everyone updated [\u2026] as we know more. We apologise for the inconvenience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two hours later at 09:49 UTC, the exchange revealed that it had made progress with its technical issue, and it would be back online soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur intervention is nearing successful completion and the Bitfinex platform will be returning in view-only mode at 9:55 AM UTC. Starting from 10:00 AM UTC, it will be possible to cancel orders before trading opens at 10:05 AM UTC. Thank you for your patience.\u201d<\/p>\n
At press time, all its systems are operational, from web server and trading engine to backend workers and web sockets.<\/p>\n
Bitfinex has yet to give any explanation on what was behind the sudden outage. Several users took to social media to call the exchange out for this, with many noting the coincidence that it went down when the market was on the uptrend.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many times offline when the market is pumping?\u201d one user posed.<\/p>\n
The last time Bitfinex went offline was on July 1 when, just as in the most recent outage, it halted trading without offering any explanation for it. A similar script transpired in August last year.<\/p>\n
Exchange outages have become a pain point for traders, with some losing hefty amounts of money as they are unable to close their trading positions. As a result, some traders have sued exchanges, with one of the biggest being a group that\u2019s suing Binance for an outage back in May.<\/p>\n
Binance Claims, as the group is known, is bankrolled by Swiss private equity firm Liti Capital and claims that the outage led to over $100 million in losses for traders.<\/p>\n