One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitfinex, was down on Tuesday morning after experiencing a major DDoS attack.
The exchange saw its operations disrupted on Tuesday morning after experiencing trouble with its trading engine. The exchange was online briefly for a while after the concerns were taken care of. However, the exchange was then struck with a denial-of-service attack to knock its systems offline.
“The platform is under extreme load,” the exchange said at 9:39am eastern time. “We are investigating. Seems a DDoS attack was launched soon after we relaunched the platform.”
The British Virgin Islands-based company has been down before, going through “unplanned maintenance” earlier and has suffered multiple DDoS attacks in 2017. The exchange has also suffered a loss of $68 million following a hack last year.
“The Bitfinex exchange was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack this morning,” Kasper Rasmussen, head of marketing at Bitfinex told Bloomberg.
He added:
“The exchange was offline for an hour following the DDoS attack; however, the exchange is back online now. 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.”
Bitcoin price touched a low for the day, dropping some 2.2 percent to $7,360 after the attack kept users from accessing, trading or withdrawing from the exchange.
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