Bitcoin's Price Is Collapsing And People Can't Trade Because Two Big Exchanges Have Crashed

Image Credit: Small Business Trends

Original Article | Author: Becky Peterson

Two of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase and Gemini, crashed on Wednesday morning, making it impossible for many users to buy or sell.

Coinbase said it saw "all-time-high traffic" that contributed to system outages.

Bitcoin fell to about $9,000 on Wednesday after surging earlier to $11,000.

Bitcoin's price on Wednesday dropped to about $9,200 from an all-time high of about $11,400 after many users found themselves locked out of two of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the US.

Coinbase showed this message to users just before noon PT on Wednesday (Credit: Business Insider)

The digital exchanges Coinbase and Gemini crashed on Wednesday after bitcoin mayhem sent prices for the cryptocurrency surging above $11,000 a pop in the early hours of the morning.

Lock-outs were also reported on Coinbase's professional trading platform GDAX and the Luxembourg-based bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.

Users of the digital exchanges saw slowed performance on the websites, and in some cases still cannot log into their accounts.

Coinbase, which has exchanged over $50 billion since its launch in 2012, posted about a "partial system outage" on early Wednesday, though many users found themselves completely locked out by afternoon.

Dave Farmer, director of Business Operations at Coinbase, said that the company experienced "all-time high traffic" early Wednesday morning, which gave some users slower performance.

"Should be fully resolved in the next couple of hours," Farmer said in prepared remarks.

Gemini, the exchange started by Facebook's notorious Winklevoss twins in 2015, showed many users a "504 Gateway Time-out" message, which means its servers were not responding to requests. The company posted on its status page that "systems are currently experiencing degraded performance."

As of 10:08 am pacific time, Gemini's system was under maintenance.