Binance system abnormality: Binance Suspends withdrawals

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended withdrawals for less than two hours on Monday. The incident was due to a malfunction in the company’s database system.

Earlier on Monday, the exchange announced on Twitter that it temporarily disabled all cryptocurrency withdrawals. As they explained, a significant backlog caused the suspension. Binance later stated that they had restored the feature. The Binance abnormality was also reported by numerous members of online communities such as Reddit. 

About 20 minutes after the resumption notification, Binance once again closed all cryptocurrency withdrawals. However, the company did not explain why this time. They later resumed the withdrawals again, and the process is going smoothly at the moment.

What caused Binance’s significant backlog?

The cryptocurrency exchange recently revealed that when BTC hit an all-time high of nearly $67,000, the trading volume on its platform exceeded $1 billion in a single day. Therefore, the large backlog is understandable. As one of the leading spot markets and a leader in the crypto derivatives market, Binance has calculated crypto trading volumes from many countries.

The exchange has encountered similar problems in the past. When the interest in cryptocurrencies was at its peak, Binance and other centralized exchanges became overloaded. This overload has often left users locked or unable to withdraw funds.

When the market crashed on May 19, 2021, Binance, Coinbase, and other exchanges temporarily fell. Thus, as prices plummeted, many users could not access their assets. Binance was accused of causing millions of dollars in losses to traders.

Since then, Swiss litigation financing group Liti Capital has raised US$5 million to sue the exchange on behalf of affected traders.

In a similar situation, users of Coinbase and other major exchanges reported last week that Shiba Inu’s surge to a record high caused their services to interrupt.

Earlier on Monday, Binance also added the trading pair of $SHIB/$DOGE. This new pair will help traders quickly transfer funds within the meme currency. The company has made this decision after Shiba Inu surged nearly 1,000% in October. So, the growing interest in meme coins like Shiba Inu may explain the backlog too.