Bitfinex crypto exchange suffers trading outage

Exchanges • April 19, 2022, 8:34AM EDT

UPDATED: April 19, 2022, 12:34PM EDT

Update (9 am EST): Bitfinex tweeted that it has identified the issue, all funds were safe and it planned to resume trading at 9:05 am EST.

Crypto exchange Bitfinex suspended trading on Tuesday after experiencing unexplained "issues."

"We are investigating issues with the platform and have to temporarily halt trading," Bitfinex tweeted from its official account at 12:37 pm London time. The exchange directed users to its status page for further updates.

The status page listed the exchange's web server, trading engine, backend workers, WebSockets and FIX gateways as "under maintenance." Bitfinex last experienced a similar outage in September, according to the status log on its website.

Bitfinex is hosting El Salvador's highly anticipated — and much delayed – listing of crypto tokens this year. Chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino told The Block in an interview last week he hopes the Salvadoran listing will be just the first of many similar fundraisings by companies and governments.

After trading resumed, a Bitfinex spokesperson gave the following statement: "A minor glitch occurred during an internal server update. As a precautionary measure, and given that current market conditions are not volatile, we paused trading to investigate further."

About Author

Andrew Rummer is executive editor for The Block Pro, based in London. He was previously managing editor at Bloomberg News and led special projects at Finimize. He has a degree in engineering from the University of Oxford. Follow him on Twitter at @AJRummer.