The Coinbase and bitcoin logos are displayed on a phone screen in San Anselmo, California, on Feb. 15, 2024.Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Coinbase's app suffered from glitches on Wednesday that led many users to see a balance of zero when opening their accounts.
Bitcoin, which had just spiked to its highest level since November 2021, lost about $2,800, or over 4%, in a matter of minutes shortly after noon eastern time as reports of the outage spread on social media platform X and elsewhere.
“We are aware that some users may see a zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and may experience errors in buying or selling,” Coinbase said in a statement to CNBC. “Our team is investigating this issue and will provide an update shortly. Your assets are safe.”
Coinbase advised users to check on the system outage at its status page: https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/qlpwww1zsm2y
One user sent a screengrab to CNBC showing a balance of $0.00 in his account. He soon received a notice titled “Site Degraded Performance,” informing him that the company was investigating the matter.
Bitcoin has been surging of late, topping $60,000 on Wednesday for the first time since 2021, reaching a collective market cap of nearly $1.2 trillion.
Coinbase posted an update on X later in the day, informing users that “we're beginning to see improvements in customer trading” though because of increased traffic, “some customers may still see errors in login, sends, receives and with some payment methods.”
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