Ep. 39: Bitcoin Dive Sparks Outage at a Popular Crypto Exchange

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. I’m joined today by Mike Hicks, Principle Solution Analyst at ThousandEyes, to cover two recent application-related outages. The first occurred on May 19th around 12:50 UTC at Coinbase—a well-known cryptocurrency exchange. Around the time that news broke saying that the Chinese government would be imposing strict regulation on cryptocurrencies, users attempting to execute transactions were unable to access the application. From the ThousandEyes platform we were able to see a drop in availability around this time as well as increased load times (which in some cases resulted in timeout errors). The second outage happened on May 20th around 17:35 UTC at Slack—an enterprise collaboration platform. While the outage was resolved within 90 minutes, it occurred during normal US business hours, making it particularly disruptive to users attempting to reach the application. These instances remind us that applications, much like the underlying networks they run on, can experience outages, and effective troubleshooting requires end-to-end visibility into both.