Binance, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, has suspended trading — but says it wasn’t hacked

pulse

February 8, 2018 5:02 PM

Binance, one of the busiest cryptocurrency exchanges, has been down since Wednesday evening.

Binance, one of the busiest cryptocurrency exchanges, has been down since Wednesday evening.
The Hong Kong company says it wasn't hacked, and that it should be back online late Thursday.

Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has suspended all trading after system maintenance took longer than expected.

The upgrades began around 7 p.m. ET Wednesday, when the Hong Kong-based exchange said users "may experience a decrease in exchange performance." However, Binance announced Thursday morning that maintenance was taking longer than expected due to "a significant increase in users and trading activity."

The company's CEO, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, took to Twitter to explain the issues. "We experienced a server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync.Need to fully resync from master," he said. "Due the size of the data, it will take several hours.No data is lost.We appreciate your understanding and support."

Binance is one of the biggest and most heavily trafficked cryptocurrency exchanges, with nearly $480 million worth of bitcoin passing through its servers in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. That volume trails only OKEx.

The company says upgrades should be complete by 11 p.m. ET Thursday — and assured users that the issues were not related to a hack.

Binance's outage comes less than a month after Japanese exchange Coincheck was hacked, costing clients $500 million.

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