Early this morning, Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex (BFXNA Inc.) went offline for a few hours due to networking issues at its datacenter. This affected all customers when the website would not load and it happened in the midst of a noticeable rise in the market value of bitcoins—BTC market value has shot up from $450 near the end of May up to $750 as recently as a few days ago.

As one of the highest-volume Bitcoin exchanges in the market, this blow to Bitfinex could have been much worse if the company did not manage to get its platform operational again as quickly as it did. Questions about the continued stability of the platform continue to persist, but the company has been excellent about keeping customers updated from the beginning of its network issues.

With an early-morning tweet, Bitfinex warned users that the platform was offline:

We are not confident in the network stability of our datacenter so we have elected to take trading down for the time being.

— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) June 21, 2016

After only about four hours of downtime, the platform came back online and trades restarted. According to tweets from the trading platform the reason for the downtime was networking problems at the datacenter. In fact, this instability caused the exchange to go offline hours before the tweet that the platform was going down for repairs.

As the platform came back online, Bitfinex’s Twitter began to explain the situation.

1) Internal networking issues between our servers seem fixed allowing us to reliably run our backend and trading engine.

— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) June 21, 2016

2) External connectivity issues remain, however, which may result in unresponsiveness, our hosting provider continues to work on the problem

— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) June 21, 2016

3) We will bring the system back up once again to allow people to cancel open orders for 15min before accepting new orders and matching.

— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) June 21, 2016

And as a matter of transparency, Bitfinex has also told users that the company will be looking into increased network redundancy in order to prevent this sort of collapse in the future.

@bitfinex Awesome, thanks! Kudo's again for the great crisis management!

— D̆̀͌igitalI͈̮ntaglio (@GMikeska) June 21, 2016

The company has a blog, but the final post-mortem of what happened has not yet appeared, and it’s been mere hours since the network issues were resolved, so it might take the engineering team some time to disclose.

Trading platforms and stability issues becoming less of a problem?

Bitfinex is one of the better known trading platforms for Bitcoin, based in Hong Kong, the platform has been operating since 2012 and launched Ethereum ETH trading in March this year. The exchange is commonly amid the top three exchanges in the world by volume and currently has almost 40 percent of total trading volume in spite of the recent downtime.

It is not uncommon for Bitcoin exchanges to go under due to datacenter instability, bugs or hacks—in the past entire exchanges such as MtGox, Bitcoinica and others were wiped from the industry due to problems with the platforms. These sudden-death scenarios continued to happen into 2015 and 2016—Bitfinex itself was hacked in May, 2015 but recovered without incident; Canadian exchange Cavirtex went under after a hack in February 2015; and Gatecoin shut down after a hack earlier this year in May.

Bitcoin volatility has been low over the past year until recently when new popularity in China came to the virtual currency, controversies continue to proliferate over the operation of the protocol (for example the block size debate) and a special event that will change mining rewards is upcoming (known as Bitcoin Halving Day). With all these factors in play, Bitcoin saw a sudden rise in market value over the past month of approximately $300 USD, a rise of nearly 70 percent over the previously stable value.

This has led to ever-increasing demands in trading volume, which no doubt is putting pressure on Bitcoin exchanges once again to perform.

What caused Bitfinex’s trouble today was not a hack—although those are still not yet uncommon—it was a problem that sometimes hits large and small services and preventing that is a business-scale problem. As is recovering from it, which Bitfinex did surprisingly well—mere hours of downtime could result in numerous lost trades.

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