Crypto exchange Binance faced a two-hour spot market outage on Friday, causing concern among traders and investors. As per reports, the outage was related to a bug in the trailing stop loss feature, and the exchange suspended spot markets at 11:38 UTC.
During the outage, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced that “engine one” was back online, but they were waiting for the other engines to catch up. CZ described the event as “unlucky,” but assured users that the exchange followed standard operating procedures.
Trailing stop loss is a type of market order that gradually reduces a position once the asset’s price hits a number of price triggers. Traders widely use the feature to minimize their losses when the market turns against them.
Crypto exchanges are prone to experiencing downtime during periods of trading volatility. In December, Gemini suffered a seven-hour outage, and last year Coinbase was forced into an outage after an advertisement was shown during the Super Bowl.
The news of the outage caused a brief dip in the price of bitcoin, but the market quickly recovered, and by the time Binance trading came back online at 14:00 UTC, bitcoin had returned to about the $28,000 level.
Binance has facilitated over $13 billion in spot trading volume in the past 24-hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Despite the outage, the exchange continues to be one of the popular trading platforms in the cryptocurrency industry.
The incident highlights the need for exchanges to improve their technological infrastructure and minimize the impact of potential bugs and system failures. The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile, and traders rely on exchanges to provide reliable and secure trading platforms.
In response to the outage, Binance has promised to investigate the issue and take steps to prevent similar incidents.
