Binance Goes Offline, Traders Outraged

Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has not been allowing any activity on its trading platform for several hours. After scheduled maintenance activity, the platform is facing some technical difficulties on its servers, and this has forced the platform to go offline for more than 12 hours.

A system maintenance is in progress, some users may experience a temporary decrease in exchange performance while this in underway.Thank you for your understanding.

— binance (@binance_2017) February 8, 2018

With a recent update, Binance is estimating that it will take 15 more hours to rectify the issue and resume trading.

Due to an unforeseen slowdown in the speed of our data sync, we now estimate for all trading activity to resume at 2018/02/09 4AM (UTC). In the 30 minutes prior to the commencement of trading, users will be able to use utilize all other account related functions. https://t.co/ll1HgPslTU

— binance (@binance_2017) February 8, 2018

On the support page, Binance wrote: “Due to a significant increase in users and trading activity, Binance will need to extend the System upgrade and is expected to be completed by 2PM (UTC).”

It added: ”Our team is working hard to complete this upgrade as quickly as possible. We will make an announcement to all users if completed ahead of schedule.”

“Withdrawals and trading during this period will remain suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience,” the message concluded.

Following this message, Binance CEO Zhao Chengpeng announced on Twitter that the team is facing some server issue that might take several hours to fix.

We experienced a server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync. Need to fully resync from master. Due the size of the data, it will take several hours. No data is lost. We appreciate your understanding and support.

— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018

Almost an hour ago, Chengpeng posted an update that the team is running behind schedule as the data synchronization process is taking much more longer than expected. He assured users that no data has been lost.

Update: Data sync is slowing down compared to before. Still got a few billion records to sync. Unfortunately, data sync is far slower than our in-memory matching engine speed. We will update a new estimated time shortly. Painful day! Also need to hire more dev ops.

— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018

Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange today, and this outage days after the attack on Japanese exchange Coincheck has raised many concerns.

Amid the outage, anxious traders suspect a hack on the platform, which Chengpeng denies. Users are talking about the subject on social media, with some critical and others sympathetic.

Binance is one of the fastest growing blockchain startups. The exchange registers daily trades in the billions and even with the outage, daily trading volume on the exchange was $2.1 billion. Chengpeng even made it to the recent Forbes list of richest cryptocurrency players.

However, it is a positive sign that the team is updating the public on the progress of their work.