Coinbase Experiences System-Wide Outage

The United States cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase experienced a system-wide outage, rendering its services unavailable for those trying to access the exchange via desktop or mobile devices. Coinbase informed users of the outage on its official status page, sharing that the major disruption began at 07:15 on May 14.

What’s Happening at Coinbase?

Attempts to visit the website currently display a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error message. According to a developer guide found on Mozilla, the most common reasons for this are servers being down for maintenance or due to excessive traffic.

Coinbase Support official shared news of the outage in a post sent to X on May 14, stating they are investigating the issue and working on a solution. They reiterated that users’ funds are safe. On February 28, Coinbase and some central exchanges experienced temporary outages due to a rapid increase in crypto trading activity, just before the Bitcoin price began to rise again, dropping about 10% during a sudden drop.

While outages are frustrating for cryptocurrency exchange users, experts on Twitter often use these interruptions as a way to spin a narrative towards a rise; they claim that the traffic congestion causing long-term outages ultimately benefits the crypto sector.