Binance temporarily suspends deposits, withdrawals; cites ‘system maintenance’

Binance, arguably the world’s biggest crypto-exchange, is down again, with many in the community reporting that they are unable to access the exchange’s platforms and trading services. The same was confirmed by CEO Changpeng Zhao, with CZ tweeting,

Disk issue with one cluster. Will be fixed shortly. Thank you for your understanding. ???

Should not have sent the last tweet. Slapping myself now.

— CZ ? Binance (@cz_binance) February 11, 2021

Later, the Binance exec also revealed that the cluster in question was part of the core matching engine. Binance tried restarting the core matching engine, however, “the data validation came up with a warning flag, an inconsistency between the master and slaves.”

“The team is running a tool to fix it. Something they know how to do. Will take a bit longer,” Binance’s CEO went on to add, going on to assure the community that all funds are #SAFU.

Interestingly, as soon as the development came to light, the crypto-exchange was quick to release a notice of temporary system maintenance. According to the statement,

“Binance has suspended deposits, withdrawals, spot and margin trading, P2P trading, OTC Portal trading, savings & redemption, as well as asset transfers from sub-accounts, margin accounts, futures accounts, and fiat wallets.”

In response to many users’ concerns about what the impact of the development would be, CZ said,

“When a big exchange pauses trading, prices usually don’t move much. Our deep orderbook will likely bring the price back (or at least a significant chunk of it). It is dangerous for people to trade away from our last price. Knock on wood. Hope @elonmusk doesn’t tweet now.”

It should be noted, however, that this is the second time the crypto-exchange’s network has faced issues this week, with the same crashing on the back of the Tesla-fueled Bitcoin hike a few days ago. At the time, CZ had tweeted,

Massive incoming traffic. Some lags observed in some regions. Auto scaling. Should catch up soon. All because of Elon.

— CZ ? Binance (@cz_binance) February 8, 2021

At the time of writing, another update was afoot, with the CEO revealing that “the team had fixed the issue.”