Crypto Exchange Kraken Back Online After Extended Downtime

[mayuri27]

The Kraken cryptocurrency exchange has come back online today, Jan. 13 at 11:30 UTC, after a more than 48-hour delay.

The exchange was scheduled to go offline on Jan. 11 at 5 UTC for a predicted two hours for a system upgrade. As the maintenance time offline grew to more than two days, Kraken only sporadically updated their status page with promises of progress and an explanation of a bug found in the production environment.

Kraken users had already been unhappy with the crypto exchange before the upgrade delay, citing difficulties placing exchanges and frequent connection errors on the site.

The highlight or lowlight of the time offline was Kraken’s update on Jan. 12, 3:46 UTC that they had sent their engineers home to rest rather than launching immediately.

The update reads:

“We are close but rather than launch immediately ahead of the team passing out; we will push off a bit to get some rest and be able to better monitor systems and react to problems following launch. Unfortunately, this means several more hours of delay.”

With their return online, Kraken announced that unleveraged trading is free until the end of the month on both their Twitter and their site. The site has been functioning normally since going online, but trading was paused for several hours due to problems displaying order book data that have since been resolved.

Earlier this year, crypto exchange Coinbase also went offline for several hours in May due to a reported degraded performance. Additionally, several other exchanges including Luno, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp experienced delays or went offline for maintenance in December after an influx of new cryptocurrency users inspired by the rising price of Bitcoin (BTC) exponentially increased the volume of traffic.

Kraken has not yet responded to Cointelegraph’s Jan. 12 request for commentary by press time.