Some Coinbase Users Unable To Trade, See Zero Balance Due to Outage as Bitcoin Soars

Key Takeaways

• A Coinbase outage impacted some users during intraday trading Wednesday as bitcoin surged to its highest price in years.
• The cryptocurrency exchange platform said it is aware of the problem and working to remedy it.
• Brian Armstrong, Coinbase co-founder and CEO, said the outage was due to a surge in traffic.
• Bitcoin climbed above the $63,000 mark for the first time since 2021 in intraday trading Wednesday.

A Coinbase (COIN) outage left some users to witness zero balance in their accounts and unable to trade Wednesday, even as bitcoin (BTCUSD) soared past $63,000.

A status update on the Coinbase website timestamped 9:40 a.m. Pacific Time said that customer assets were “safe” and that the exchange was “aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and may experience errors in buying or selling.”

With bitcoin rallying to its highest price since November 2021, a surge in traffic may have caused the service disruption, according to a post by Coinbase co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Brian Armstrong on X.

By 7:15 p.m. Eastern, Coinbase said it had restored all services on Coinbase.com, though some customers continued to see incorrect account balances. Earlier in the day, the exchange admitted that high traffic had caused the some of the issues that its users faced. Armstrong also posted on X that traffic surge Wednesday was greater than 10x—the threshold Coinbase had tested it could handle.

While a direct correlation cannot be drawn, there was a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin in the immediate few minutes preceding Coinbase’s post about the interruption.

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Earlier today, there was another service disruption that involved delayed transactions for some Coinbase users trading on the Ethereum network. That issue was resolved close to 1:30 p.m. Eastern.

Coinbase shares gave up some of their earlier gains and were up 0.79%, trading a shade above $200 around 3:27 p.m. ET Wednesday. Bitcoin gave up its earlier gains, slipping under $60,000 before reclaiming that price milestone, higher by roughly 5% for the day.

(Update—Feb. 28, 2024: This story was updated to include more recent outage status provided by Coinbase, additional comments from Coinbase CEO Armstrong’s X posts and more current price movements.)