Kraken, Coinbase Suffer Outages Amid Market Volatility

Some of the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges are having trouble handing Friday's market volatility.

• Kraken's trading is enabled again although "intermittent connectivity issues" remain 17 hours after the company's entire site was relegated to full "maintenance mode" Thursday morning.
• The company battled a second day of severe connectivity issues after Thursday saw an outage of the exchange's trading API, though the web interface was still operational.
• Coinbase also suffered "performance degradation," per its status page. And as the exchanged worked on a fix, reports of the exchange disabling USD buys circulated on Twitter. A Coinbase spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk that USD buys were down, saying it was related to the outage issues.
• Several hours after the incident occured, Coinbase updated the status page to say "trading is 100% backup [sic]," which was followed by another update shortly thereafter saying "all services are back up" and Coinbse is "continuing to monitor for any future issues."
• Bitcoin's price shot up nearly 20% early Friday morning to over $38,000.
• These two exchanges have suffered downtime already this month, with both venues going down after bitcoin traded above $39,000 for the first time in early January, per CoinDesk's prior reporting.

This is a developing story and will be updated.