Coinbase Shuts Down Twice In A Week, Suspects CloudFlare To Have Malfunctioned

Coinbase, one of the major crypto exchanges in the world went inaccessible to its users twice in under a week.

The platform was rendered inaccessible on mobile and desktop browsers around 20:45 UTC. Bitcoin’s price, which saw a high of nearly $13,900 on Wednesday, fell over the past hour, dropping as low as $11,900. Despite recovering back above $12,000, the price is currently hovering at roughly $11327.30 as of the time of publication.
This kind of occurrence is not common and result in extremely unsatisfied customers. The developers have not been able to pinpoint the real cause for the platform’s inactivity. Although they have mentioned that the DDoS protection service provider CloudFlare might have malfunctioned.
Previously, other companies using CloudFare have also complained about disrupted services from the security provider.
With its huge user base, it is rather unlikely that the Coinbase users will flock to alternative exchanges in the near future assuming these outages do not occur more and more frequently. An unstable cryptocurrency exchange is not accepable for anyone, and it can also have an adverse effect on the prices of the supported currencies as well.
As far as the entire cryptocurrency industry is concerned, outages like these highlight the need for decentralized services. More importantly, while trading the various cryptocurrencies, use of centralized services becomes pointless if there isn’t any added convenience. However, these companies are fully in control over user funds, which can arise the issue of trust if the service is interrupted along the way.
If Coinbase sees a third outage in this week, there are very high chances of the Bitcoin price to drop drastically again, statistics show. Thus the coming days will be very crucial for the crypto economy and should be keenly observed by enthusiasts.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.