Update 10:32 UTC – It soeems some cryptocurrency traders were also able to buy Ethereum’s ether at $0.33 per coin as cryptocurrencies seemingly flash-crashed on BitMax.
*sarcastic slow clap* @BitMax_Official
I feel bad for the margin traders.
33 cents Ethereum… pic.twitter.com/Zs8F1hUbH1— MrJozza (@MrJozza) August 23, 2019
The exchange hasn’t yet commented on the incident and has only made it clear withdrawals are halted on its platform. Rolling back the trades may be a possibility.
Cryptocurrency investors were able to buy bitcoin for as little as $0.3 worth of USDT after Amazon‘s cloud service, AWS, suffered an outage that affected various crypto exchanges.
According to Founding partner at Primitive Ventures Dovey Wan, an unnamed Asian exchange saw price instability affect in a way that some trades were executed and allowed investors to buy bitcoin, which was trading at around $10,200 at the time, for less than $1 in Tether’s stablecoin.
The image Dovey Wan posted reportedly came from a Telegram group related to BitMax. The order book data, however, may not have come from BitMax itself as the exchange isn’t certain it’s from its own platform. Since the outage, however, it has halted withdrawals.
Many Asian exchanges see price instability (and trades were able to execute, yes you can buy extremely cheap Bitcoin if you had limit orders there) pic.twitter.com/SZ30iqBjX3
— Dovey Wan 🗝 🦖 (@DoveyWan) August 23, 2019
Other cryptocurrency exchanges were notably also affected by AWS’ outage. Binance, one of the world’s leading crypto exchanges in terms of trading volume, revealed the outage affected some of its users throughout the world. As its CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted:
AWS is having an issue, mostly with caching services, affecting some users globally. We are working with them and monitoring the situation closely.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) August 23, 2019
KuCoin, another popular Exchange, posted a notice on its website revealing that “due to the overheating of part of our chassis in the machine room we deployed in AWS, Tokyo, part of our services might become unavailable.” It added its engineers were looking o deploy resources to deal with the problem.
On its status page, AWS reports its facilities in Tokyo have been facing problems, but the company has claimed it found the root cause of the problem and working to recover from the problem.
Source: AWS
Amazon Web Services notably controls a large part of the cloud market, and runs the backend of various popular websites – including Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify, and Slack. It faced other services outages in the last few months and when it did, a large part of internet-based services relying on it went down.
