Coinbase experiences second zero-balance bug in five days

Crypto exchange Coinbase once again experienced an issue that caused some users to see an empty balance in their accounts on March 4.

At 5:36 pm UTC, the company wrote:

“A small subset of users may see intermittent zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and latency across pages. Trading is not impacted at this time. Our team is investigating this issue and will provide an update shortly. Your assets are safe.”

Coinbase implemented a fix around 6:21 pm UTC — roughly three hours after identifying the issue. The exchange continued monitoring the issue in the following hours and announced the problem was fully resolved at 8:29 pm UTC.

The company experienced a nearly identical issue just five days earlier, on Feb. 28. At that time, users saw zero balance in their accounts and were unable to buy or sell assets. The company resolved the issue roughly seven hours after confirming its existence.

Outage likely caused by traffic surge

Though Coinbase has not identified the cause of the latest incident, it described increased traffic as a factor in the Feb. 28 incident. The company wrote:

“Due to continued heightened traffic some customers may still see errors in receives and with some payment methods.”

Despite the resolution of both incidents, data suggests continued demand. The exchange saw $7.5 billion in trading volume over 24 hours, representing a 120% daily increase. The high volumes are likely tied to Bitcoin’s exceptional price performance.

As of 10:20 pm UTC on March 4, Bitcoin (BTC) was valued at $67,481 — just $1,563 below its November 2021 all-time high. The price is up 7.1% over 24 hours and 23.6% over the past week.

Despite much speculation around the root cause of the speculation — ranging from positive to nefarious — the issue is most likely a side effect of sudden unexpected surges in traffic amid the recent market rally.

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