Coinbase Explains Why Its Site Crashed When Bitcoin Price Passed $10,000
by Eric Martin 
This has happened several times to the Coinbase website to crash during major movements in the Bitcoin BTC price.
The last time Bitcoin went over $10,000 in price, Coinbase users were unpleasant to see the site offline again.
We may wonder how a company like Coinbase cannot set up enough server resources to cope with traffic increases.
Technical incidents that led some Coinbase customers to close their accounts to look elsewhere as we have seen on social networks where many users of the American crypto exchange have asked for explanations about these repeated crashes.
Coinbase has therefore published an explanation for the latest crash of its website, during the rise of the Bitcoin price towards 10,000 dollars.
The Coinbase team thus indicates that the traffic on its website increased by 5 times in 4 minutes and that its servers could not keep up.
Technical problems that affected coinbase.com but also mobile applications or coinbase pro.
“Around 4:05 p.m. PDT, the price of BTC reached 10,000 USD. As part of the price increase, we experienced a traffic spike 5 times over 4 minutes. Our automatic scaling could not keep pace with this dramatic increase in traffic. This traffic spike has affected a number of our internal services, increasing latency between services.
This led to the saturation of the processes of the web servers responsible for our API, where the number of incoming requests was greater than the number of listening processes, resulting in the queuing and expiration of requests, or the immediate failure. Our request error rate has peaked at 50%, causing customers to make mistakes when interacting with coinbase.com and our mobile apps.”
However, during the last Bitcoin BTC bull run in 2017, these crypto exchanges had already experienced significant traffic increases, it seems that these providers are still not ready 3 years later…
Faced with complaints from its customers and these repeated technical incidents, the American crypto exchange says it has learned the lessons from these crashes and breakdowns.
“In response to these events, we are working on a number of improvements. We have since fixed the integrity endpoint to ensure that saturated instances are not removed from the rotation.
We’re working to reduce the impact of price spikes in traffic through pre-scaling and caching. In the longer term, we plan to improve our deployment process to alleviate some of the automatic scaling issues we have encountered.”
The future will tell us if Coinbase has managed to take the technical measures necessary to avoid being in these situations where its website or mobile applications no longer work, when customers need them most.
A Bitcoin price currently around $9,770.
