After 30+ hours of unavailability, Binance is fully functional again with a 70% discount on trading fees for the next two weeks.
The trading platform, which held the title of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world as of January 2018, allowing trading for more than 190 different cryptocurrencies, with user numbers increasing by 240,000 per hour, went suddenly offline yesterday, freezing all of its transaction services after announcing allegedly technical problems resulting in slowdowns on their data synch, avowing an extended 24h time-frame to resume trading activities, which were already inoperable 11 hours prior to the announcement.
Due to an unforeseen slowdown in the speed of our data sync, we now estimate for all trading activity to resume at 2018/02/09 4AM (UTC). In the 30 minutes prior to the commencement of trading, users will be able to use utilize all other account related functions. https://t.co/ll1HgPslTU
— binance (@binance_2017) February 8, 2018
Concerns of a hack which could compromise their users’ safety, coming from prominent names like John McAfee, were blatantly refuted by their CEO, Changpeng Zhao, who updated Binance’s twitter every two hours with progress reports and warranting they were safe from any risk.
Not trying to spread FUD, but I have received dozens of reports like this one. I’m just trying to understand. As a security researcher, I know that potential hacks are far more easy to solve if investigated immediately. Days later magnifies the task by orders of manitude. pic.twitter.com/u1PL9Z4tGf
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) February 8, 2018
We will maintain communication at difficult times. Those are hot wallets, only a tiny % there. But it should be clear your coins are safe. We wish disks moved faster. We will engineer around them in the future. Your encouraging words is all we work for. https://t.co/1i0Dw3YjV1
— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018
Zhao, which was featured this week in a Forbes List of cryptocurrencies richest, responded to McAfee saying he was, indeed, spreading fud, and that he would prove him wrong.
But you are spreading fud. We will prove you wrong. https://t.co/QTuK6t2ZS3
— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018
Today, February 9, Binance announced on its site that it had finished its system upgrades and that trading activities were to return to normal at 10:00 AM (UTC). They also included measures for making up for their offline time, acquainting that, for the next two weeks “to show our gratitude for your unwavering support throughout the upgrade process, Binance will provide all users with a 70% discount on trading fees”
Binance’s CEO, earlier today, prior to the website’s relaunch, revealed that there was indeed a DDoS attack on their cloud provider which was resolved but had some lingering effects. Excessive downtimes were attributed to a huge database of 6 million recently registered users, which required a long syncing time.
This isn’t the first time something like this happen to a major exchange, but Zhao’s attitude to disclose every detail about what was happening to their platform with an impressive frequency and his interaction with Binance’s interested parties via twitter was very different from Kraken’s silence when they similarly went offline last month.
