Cryptocurrency markets were spooked in trading Thursday after leading bitcoin exchange Binance went offline for over 24 hours without warning.

Hong Kong-based Binance went offline at approximately 7 p.m. EST Wednesday as part of a system upgrade that the company said would result in a “decrease in exchange performance” for a period of four hours. A decrease in service was not what users received, however, as the exchange went down completely for an entire day. Binance promised it would return at 11 p.m. Thursday.

The overdue return of the exchange resulted in rumors that Binance had been hacked. John “I’ll eat my d**k if bitcoin doesn’t hit $1 million” McAfee (pictured) posted on Twitter that “rumors are flying among top crypto influencers that they may have been hacked.” Binance responded directly to McAfee, saying that “Binance has not been hacked. Please do not spread false information.”

According to a rundown of the downtime published by Coindesk, the problem was a server issue that caused data to fall out of sync. Chief Executive Changpeng Zhao said the development team would have to resync from a master database. In subsequent tweets, Zhao said that the maintenance did not proceed as planned, prolonging the outage.

Whatever the reason, hacking or incompetence, it’s not what the cryptocurrency market wanted to hear at a time when another exchange, Bitfinex, is under investigation for fraud. The hack of Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc. in January also spooked markets.

Bitcoin itself bounced around all day, ranging from $7,827.17 to $8,616.81. As of 11 p.m. EST, it was trading at $8009.86.

Photo: Henderson County Sheriff Office