Major cryptocurrency exchanges rocked by $250B market dump

A slew of top crypto exchanges — including Binance and Kraken — suffered service interruptions overnight as traders wiped over $250 billion from the market.

Investors and industry insiders took to Twitter to report the outages while cryptocurrency exchanges did their best to keep users updated.

• Crypto.com said extreme traffic meant users didn’t receive crypto they’d bought.
• Kraken, Gemini, and Voyager all confirmed outages via their service or status pages
• Binance suspended withdrawals as Ethereum was falling nearly 10%.

Our extreme levels of traffic over the last few days brought down one of payment infrastructure vendors. The result was that a number of users didn’t receive the crypto they bought.

Rest assured: If you bought crypto with a card in the last few days, you will receive it.

— Kris | Crypto.com (@Kris_HK) May 11, 2021

Some indicated Bahamas-based FTX also grappled with technical issues, but FTX has so far neither confirmed or denied the reports.

Others showed Coinbase had been rocked by the sell-off. However, a spokesperson told Protos: “To our knowledge Coinbase did not experience any downtime. If there is something you saw, please let us know.”

It's gotten boring to remind people that markets and withdrawals are fully functioning on @FTX_Official, @ftx_us, and @blockfolio, so instead here's a picture of a coin we added spot deposits/withdrawals of in part because it was trading at less than $0.01 pic.twitter.com/B0OQDyPBdu

— SBF (@SBF_Alameda) May 10, 2021

Crypto exchange headaches as Bitcoin fell

Monday’s tech problems at cryptocurrency exchanges coincided with Bitcoin and Ethereum dropping up to 10%.

Overall, the entire crypto market started the day worth $2.4 trillion, according to TradingView.

But crypto’s collective market cap lost a pearl-clutching 11% throughout the day, falling to $2.14 trillion by 20:00 UTC. Prices have since rebounded.

[Read more: Germany says ‘nein’ to Binance, stock token warning stays]

The crash is the second such event in the past month. In April, the crypto market lost $310 billion in less than 24 hours.

Analysts reasoned the skittish markets were the result of a sudden collapse in Bitcoin hash rate.

China’s Xinjiang region — home to some of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining operations — experienced widespread blackouts at the time.

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