Bitcoin Surges Cause Coinbase Outages

Coinbase, the world’s largest bitcoin company, announced that it suffered outages this week when the bitcoin exchange saw “unprecedented traffic and trading,” with the digital currency hitting record levels.

According to Reuters, Bitcoin fell as much as 6.5 percent to $2,263.72 at around 1730 GMT on Thursday, but rebounded shortly after to hit an all-time high of $2,760.10. So far this year, the price of bitcoin has more than doubled.

Bitcoin also hit a record on the BitStamp platform on Wednesday due to an increased demand for crypto-assets, with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for startups using blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin.

Coinbase, which has operations in 32 countries, experienced issues earlier this week on its platform, including card verification failures and slow load times. Those issues have been resolved.

The company revealed the heavy traffic had caused outages at its website as well. The exchange said it was working to resolve the issues.