Binance, one of the hottest and newest exchanges from China having started with their operations in July 2017, dedicated to only trading coin to coin, has currently shut down trading, depositing, and withdrawing activities due to a server issue. What started off as a small server maintenance issue quickly escalated, as we can testify through Binance’s posts on Twitter.
A system maintenance is in progress, some users may experience a temporary decrease in exchange performance while this in underway.Thank you for your understanding.
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
Two hours later the social media team notified the public that an extension of the time necessary to fix the issue, this time calling it a system upgrade instead of just maintenance.
System Upgrade Extensionhttps://t.co/ZLHuhnswTm
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
The link is dead, and support.binance.com is unresponsive at the time of writing. Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, soon after wrote on Twitter that there is a problem with the server that caused some data to go out of sync. Sounds scary, but apparently no data has been lost.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/961429082310258688
A huge amount of data has been compromised, but meticulously writing data twice has its benefits, as the replica database provides a failsafe in case of severe data or server issues. There also seems to have been some miscommunication on part of the Binance social media messages. At one point it is stated that the maintenance is planned, and later on, the CEO said that the website is down due to unexpected server issues. While this would be a concern for many other subjects, when talking about Binance I have a little bit more faith in their capabilities.
Are we willing to look through this slight miscommunication, even though it is quite inconvenient?
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/961461370834206720
10 hours is a long time to resync a database, but that just works to show how much traffic, how many trades, and responsibility is being passed down on Binance. Better to be safe than sorry, but unfortunately this “maintentance” will take more than 24 hours in total. Additionally, they have found the cause of the problem, and we know for certain that the exchange has not been hacked! There is no reason for panic. The worst case scenario is that Binance is going to force people to pause trading for 24 hours, as that is the expected total amount of time they are hoping to spend in solving the issues.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/961591259901997056
From what I understand, they are just trying to sync up the databases so that their failsafe is activated again. Everyone would be affected negatively if Binance allowed themselves to be vulnerable to permanent database damage. Fortunately, they have already taken preventative measures against this kind of event, and instead of a crisis, we are looking at a relatively short period of 24 hours to fix the problem.
They expect trading to resume on 09/02/2018 at 4am UTC, which is about 8 hours away from the time of writing this article.
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) February 8, 2018
We at Crypto-News.net wish Binance to have the best recovery and to reestablish their markets in a timely and organized fashion. These things happen, and as long as responsibilities are met and nobody loses anything we are going to be grateful for the success.
Of course, this event has caused significant negative reactions among the less patient Binance users who are scolding the platform for being outrageous and not fair. So far, they’ve been giving us constant updates on the situation.
Happy to say that we are still on track for trading to recommence at 4 am UTC 2018/02/09.
Reminder: We will allow a 30-minute window where users can cancel open orders prior to trading being opened.
We will continue to update every two hours until the upgrade is complete.
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
We are traveling steadily, trading is still estimated to recommence at 4am UTC 2018/02/09.
Thank you all for continuing to remain so patient and understanding.
Reminder: We will allow a 30-minute window where users are able to cancel orders prior to trading being re-opened.
— Binance (@binance) February 8, 2018
Even their support desk is offline, so don’t be surprised if some of the content on the website is not available.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/961584967988817921
Images courtesy of Binance and Twitter.
10 Hours for a database restore (of their size) is not a long time. I’d be quite impressed if they actually pull it off in 10 hours. Our group has been through this type of database issue before and it is not an easy task. Be supportive Binance community…