South Korea’s Bithumb experienced a technical outage that caused significant damages to users who relied on the app for trading activities. The platform stopped working for 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Summary
- Bithumb experienced a 100-minute outage which led to customers losing money when trading was halted.
- This is one of several occurrences where Bithumb has had a system outage.
According to local media reports, Bithumb experienced an unexpected system error which halted trading activities on the platform. Traders claimed to have experienced significant losses due to the outage.
South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange went down for approximately 100 minutes, starting from 11:27 PM on September 2. The day after the outage, Bithumb declared that it would fully compensate users who incurred losses due to the trading suspension.
The platform claimed that the outage occurred because of a system failure rather than an exploit from an external source. The cause of the technical issue was discovered to be a “transaction system error.”
“It was not due to external factors such as hacking. We are analyzing the technical error to prevent a recurrence,” wrote the platform in a statement to Seoul Kyungjae.
On September 2, the crypto exchange’s trading volume experienced a significant drop before slowly attempting to recover from the momentary dip. According to data from CoinGecko, the trading volume fell from $1 billion to the $900 million mark.
According to the Bithumb representative, the exchange now plans to conduct a “sequential review” of all customer complaints related to the outage. It is also prepared to provide full compensation to traders who had lost money as a result of the outage.
The platform hopes it can finish the review process and provide compensation for customers within one month’s time.
On September 2, Bithumb experienced a technical error which caused a delay in order execution. This led to a pause on its order book, halting all trading activity on the platform. According to the exchange representative, its engineers “immediately began conducting system maintenance” after finding out the root of the problem.
How many times has Bithumb gone down?
This is not the first time the South Korean crypto exchange has experienced a system outage. In fact, there have been quite a few prominent cases recorded. On June 2017 when Bithumb servers crashed due to a price spike in XRP.
Later in November 2017, the platform experienced a major server crash which lasted around 90 minutes. Reports from the time said the crash happened because of a sudden surge in trading fueled by a Bitcoin rally that overwhelmed the system. A month later it experienced an exploit of over $7 million by North Korean hackers.
In July 2023, Bithumb experienced what was dubbed the “Midnight Cloud Network Crash” when Trading stopped from about 12:43 AM to 1:37 AM KST due to problems it encountered with the AWS cloud infrastructure.
The most recent system outage before the one that occurred at the beginning of this month happened alongside South Korea’s Martial Law period on December 3, 2024. At the time, crypto trading services were disrupted during nationwide martial law, overwhelmed by traffic from traders frantically withdrawing their funds. Bithumb experienced about 62 minutes of downtime.
