The fourth biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Bitfinex, shut down briefly on Tuesday morning after a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on its trading platform.
It started in the morning when the company paused operations for an “unplanned maintenance”, assuring users that all funds were safe, after which they went back live in a couple of hours.
Trading and funding is currently paused whilst we undergo unplanned maintenance. All features likely to resume shortly. Apologies for the inconvenience.— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018
Two hours later, trading was once again down and the exchange tweeted that its platform was “under extreme load”.
Bitfinex is currently under extreme load. We are investigating the issue and will keep you all up to date as we learn more.— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018
While the first outage was caused due to an issue with one of their infrastructure providers, according to the company, the second outage followed soon after and was claimed to have been caused by a DDoS attack, causing an “extreme load on the servers”.
“We are adjusting the DDoS protection measures to fend off the attack and be able to relaunch. Currently we are running tests to make sure we can safely restart operations,” the company reported on its website after the attack.
According to data from CoinDesk, Bitcoin prices fell almost 2 percent after the attack, hitting a low of $7,373.47 a coin at one point.
According to a report by CNBC, a Bitfinex spokesperson said, "The attack only impacted trading operations, and user accounts and their associated funds/account balances were not at risk at any point during the attack.”
