Source: blockchain.news
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase issued alerts at 7:57 a.m. ET on Sunday morning stating that its platform was experiencing an outage that left Coinbase account holders with US bank accounts unable to transact.
In a statement, Coinbase said: “We are currently unable to accept payments or make withdrawals involving US bank accounts. Our team is aware of this issue and is working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.”
At 8:23 a.m. ET, the exchange issued another update stating that its engineers identified the transaction issues and the fix was being implemented. The root cause of the issue was a bug that restricted US bank accounts from making withdrawals, deposits, or purchases on the platform.
Coinbase identified the issue as an issue with “ACH withdrawals, deposits, and purchase failures.” ACH (Automated Clearing House Network) is a system used to transfer funds electronically in the US between bank accounts.
The exchange further clarified that affected users can still use debit cards or PayPal to make direct crypto purchases during the downtime. The firm described the technical failure as a “major outage”. While all other tokens supported on the platform were still fully tradable, Solana (SOL) experienced poor performance due to its outage incident that started on Friday night and lasted for much of Saturday.
Coinbase later released an update reassuring its account holders that their funds are safe and said it would release more information when functionality resumes. As of 11:30 am EST on Sunday, the issue was still unresolved.
This is not the first incident faced by the exchange. In May, Coinbase experienced difficulty withdrawing funds. Users witnessed continual delays in withdrawals, leaving thousands of dollars in balance while others were unable to access the app or website.
The exchange confirmed the issue to head off heightened fears amid a widespread drop in cryptocurrency prices, adding urgency to trades and withdrawals. The price drop pushed many users to sell their assets and put a strain on the underlying financial infrastructure of several companies.
In June, a Cloudflare outage brought down several major popular web services, including crypto exchanges like FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX, raising questions about the security of centralized crypto platforms. Many services affected by the Cloudflare incident were back online within two hours.
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