- BitMEX suffered a major outage with its trading engine
- Bitcoin remained steady while BitMEX was down
- The trading engine was brought back online and was fully up and running by 15:00 UTC
BitMEX has been making headlines this week, and it’s making yet another as its trading engine suffers a huge outage, causing the popular platform to come grinding to a halt. The engine was taken offline on May 19 at 12:13 UTC and BitMEX hoped to have it back up and running by 15:00 UTC, a time frame it managed to stick to.
During the outage, no liquidations took place and the service was restored with a cancel only mode in place until 13:40 UTC.
Last Time BitMEX Crashed Bitcoin Followed
BitMEX is responsible for $2.2 billion worth of Bitcoin future trading every 24 hours, and this huge volume has a significant impact on the price of Bitcoin. Back on 13 March, the BitMEX platform suffered a DDoS attack that took it down for around 25 minutes. Immediately after the attack subsided, Bitcoin fell to fresh 12-month lows. Fortunately for Bitcoiners, no huge flash crash took place and Bitcoin traded around 0.1% up.
More Trouble for BitMEX
Yesterday it was announced that BitMEX is being sued on seven counts, including racketeering and fraud. The suit comes from the same firm that’s targeting Ripple and has become synonymous with the crypto industry. Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement, LLC (BMA) claims that Arthur Hayes, BitMEX CEO, behaved in a “brazenly lawless manner”. BitMEX is already being sued by a group of investors and the UK financial regulator warned against using BitMEX. Could all of these cases catch up with BitMEX and cause it to crash and burn? Many people certainly hope so!
Normal Service Resumed
Fortunately for BitMEX users, not much happened with Bitcoin and its price during the outage. This means nobody got BitMEX rekt, but no doubt that a number of traders had to postpone their plans to place new trade orders on the platform. Hopefully BitMEX will release a full report of the issue in the coming days.
