Binance Suffers Two-Hour Spot Market Outage Due to Software Bug

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance suspended trading on its spot markets for two hours Friday because of a computer bug related to the trailing stop loss feature.

The world's largest crypto exchange announced that it suspended spot markets at 11:38 UTC. Roughly one hour later, Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao revealed that "engine one," referring to one of the trading engines, was back online and that it was waiting for the other engines to catch up.

CZ described the event as "unlucky" before stating that the outage followed "standard operating procedure."

A trailing stop is a type of market order that gradually reduces a position once the price of the asset hits a number of price triggers.

Crypto exchanges are prone to experiencing downtime during periods of trading volatility. Gemini suffered a seven-hour outage in December and Coinbase was forced into an outage after an advertisement was shown at last year's Super Bowl.

News of the outage caused about a $700 dip in the price of bitcoin (BTC), but by the time Binance trading came back online at 14:00 UTC, bitcoin had returned to about the $28,000 level.

Binance suffered an outage in November 2021 that lead to a lawsuit from a group of Italian investors who claimed to have racked up "tens of millions" in losses.

Binance has facilitated over $13 billion in spot trading volume in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

UPDATE (March 24, 2023, 14:35 UTC): Updated headline and added context throughout to reflect developments.