Bitfinex Temporarily Stopped Trading on Tuesday Morning Following an Attack

The prominent cryptocurrency trading platform Bitfinex stopped trading functions early Tuesday morning. The exchange stopped operating for a few hours, but it went back online at around noon Eastern Time. The issue caused cryptocurrencies to drop in value, but no further damages took place.

The attack raises concerns about the safety of such exchanges. Bitfinex has been open about the circumstances surrounding the attack, but not much extra is being discussed at this point about how the attack went along and what else is happening through it.

About the Attack

Bitfinex was hit by a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack. This occurs as many servers send viruses out to a system, thus keeping the entire system from working appropriately. Bitfinex stated that the outage was due to the servers suffering from a stronger load than usual.

The exchange also said that the Bitfinex server system was undergoing unplanned maintenance at the time of the attack. Also, the attack only caused trading functions to stop. No user accounts were impacted, nor were their balances hurt by the attack.

Currency Impacts

Cryptocurrencies suffered a slight drop following the Bitfinex attack. The bitcoin fell by about two percent in value, thus falling down to around $7,300. The currency had rebounded in the hours after the attack, going up to $7,600 in just a few bits.

The decline can be seen around other currencies on the market. Litecoin, Ethereum, and Cardano were among the currencies that also saw a similar drop. Like the bitcoin, all of those went back up in a few hours.

Many currencies that were experiencing downward trends also saw drops in their values. Bitcoin Private continued its decline with the attack making the situation worse. The currency dropped by around five percent in a 24-hour span as of Tuesday afternoon.

DigixDAO and Mixin also saw a continuation of their declines. Other currencies like the Huobi Token saw their upward trends continue, but the attack did keep them from moving along as well as hoped.

History Details

This DDoS attack does not mark the first time that Bitfinex has been attacked. A year ago, hackers attacked the exchange as the bitcoin and other currencies began their rise. A separate attack occurred two years earlier as nearly 120,000 bitcoins were stolen.

Bitfinex remains a popular option for cryptocurrency trading. The Hong Kong-based exchange has been working since 2012 to support many currencies and has grown over the years in terms of what it has to offer and give to its investors.

Also, Bitfinex has not experienced attacks that were as significant as what some other exchanges have dealt with. In 2014, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy after losing 850,000 bitcoins that belonged to itself and to investors on the exchange. The Coincheck exchange was also hacked earlier this year as nearly half a billion dollars of another currency was stolen. This came not long after Youbit lost almost a fifth of its assets in a hack, thus causing the exchange’s parent company to file for bankruptcy following the issue.