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Coinbase down for maintenance

coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#171

Post by 27182818284 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #141
wonderwonder wrote: post #124

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Coinbase goes through this charade every time this happens with a major digital currency. It wasn't a legitimate excuse the first time, and it's not an excuse the 7th time. Scaling is a solved problem. You have AWS, Google Cloud, and MS Azure to choose from with financial institution/HIPAA-level offerings.

Imgur was reporting being over capacity just this morning.

By most engineers in the field it is a difficult problem with ongoing work.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#172

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Snackchez wrote: post #8

All of this is anecdotal: These past couple of days, whenever a coin soars a ridiculous amount, on any given exchange, that exchange seems to mysteriously go down. For example: Binance and Bitfinex were down for "maintenance" (or just plain down), while IOTA was experiencing a surge in price (from ~1.10 to 6$). Similarly this happens with Bitcoin today (it seems Quadriga had some issues and Coinbase; not sure about o…

No need for conspiracy theories.

These services are like banks, but the traffic they handle is more like a news site, due to the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies. Super-security combined with extremely large traffic fluctuations.

Whoever is on PagerDuty at Coinbase these days - I feel for ya.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#173

Post by pishpash »

chickenfries wrote: post #152
wonderwonder wrote: post #124

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

Coinbase probably deals with lots of bot trading. Most consumer-facing startups deal with human-scale behavior, not bot-scale.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#174

Post by Klathmon »

chickenfries wrote: post #152
wonderwonder wrote: post #124

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

I don't know about Stripe or Whatsapp, but I know coinbase has had an average of 30,000 new users a day for a while, with spikes of over 100,000 new signups in a single day around thanksgiving.

It's absolutely bonkers amounts of growth!

Edit: more concrete numbers:

In January of 2016 they had around 2.6 million users.

On November 29th they announced they had over 13 million users.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#175

Post by pixelHD »

TFortunato wrote: post #64

I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently ( https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 ), if Coinbase / GDAX instituted some sort of "circuit breakers" on their exchange to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Bitcoin and the other cryptos, trades at a pretty low volume relative to their market cap, so if a lot of people we're trying to dump large orders this morning to take a p…

Related, https://twitter.com/Vueron/status/935995302049472520

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#176

Post by appdrag »

haburka wrote: post #154
gamblor956 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase goes through this charade every time this happens with a major digital currency. It wasn't a legitimate excuse the first time, and it's not an excuse the 7th time. Scaling is a solved problem. You have AWS, Google Cloud, and MS Azure to choose from with financial institution/HIPAA-level offerings.

Lol scaling is not a solved problem. Garbage collection is a solved problem. Scaling is always a challenge.

Scaling is by design, seems it was not designed to scale (serverless architecture and db)

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#177

Post by Klathmon »

DougWebb wrote: post #133
wonderwonder wrote: post #124

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

"We want to run an exchange that the entire world will use for this crypto-currency that's become very popular and has increased in price 1000% since it became widely known." I think I would have predicted that they'd need to run at a very large scale, and be able to handle massive spikes. Whether or not I could have convinced them to make the investment is another story.

The problem is what happens if that growth stops? What happens if bitcoin tanks right after you hired 300 new customer service reps and tripled your server hardware?

It's a gamble no matter what, but moving too quickly or moving too slowly results in the company going under.

In that case, I think straddling the line of "overwhelmed when there is a big spike" is a good spot to be in all things consitered.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#179

Post by simonsarris »

wonderwonder wrote: post #124

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Slapdash startup-ism in an exchange for a Brave New Currency is just as scary as a conspiracy. It may be more scary.

At least with the Cabal theories you know someone knows what's going on. You might even have someone to blame/jail at the end of the tunnel!

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#180

Post by njarboe »

Klathmon wrote: post #174
chickenfries wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

I don't know about Stripe or Whatsapp, but I know coinbase has had an average of 30,000 new users a day for a while, with spikes of over 100,000 new signups in a single day around thanksgiving. It's absolutely bonkers amounts of growth! Edit: more concrete numbers: In January of 2016 they had around 2.6 million users. On November 29th they announced they had over 13 million users.

Jan 2016 to now is 23 months. Still big but half as much.
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