Posted on August 22, 2018 at 6:08 PM
BitMEX DDoS Attacked Right After Maintenance
A recent scheduled maintenance held by BitMEX was followed by several unexpected developments, with the first one being a significant jump in Bitcoin’s (BTC) price, and the other one being a DDoS attack that hit the platform as soon as it came back up.
Bitcoin price jumped as soon as the maintenance started
The price of Bitcoin has been going up and down for months now. More often than not, it was getting lower and lower, with an occasional spike up that was always followed by high expectations from crypto investors. The latest surge happened only hours ago after a trading platform BitMEX went on with its pre-announced maintenance.
As soon as the platform went down, Bitcoin did the opposite, and its price jumped up to $6,900 per coin, from being only $6,450 prior to the event. Analysts have commented on this by saying that it is not unusual for investors to buy coins during maintenance, only to sell them after it was done, and sure enough, as soon as BitMEX came back up, Bitcoin value slowly started to decline towards its previous level.
The real surprise came after the platform returned
However, as exciting as this little event was, this was not all that happened during BitMEX’s move. According to reports, some of the platform’s users had difficulties logging into their accounts, and the platform announced on Twitter that they are looking into the problem.
Some users are reporting difficulty in logging in. We are diagnosing. We have postponed resumption of trading for 5 minutes to 01:35. We will report back shortly.
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) August 22, 2018
Soon after that, they announced that they are under a DDoS attack, which was likely what prevented the users from accessing the platform. The attack had forced the maintenance to last longer than previously expected, and it caused concern among the platform’s users.
Due to these concerns, many of the users reacted by stating that the platform was a scam and that BitMEX is robbing its customers. The fact was that the users were not able to log back into their accounts and cancel their positions. One user even stated that the platform allowed its users to get liquidated, with another user on Reddit stating that it was stupid to leave a position open during maintenance. This user stated that the order was small, which is a good thing, but they still got liquidated during the incident.
The user also predicted that the platform will be receiving a lot of hate because of everything that has happened, and they were mostly right.
Eventually, the platform managed to fix the issues with the login process, and supposedly even fend off the attack. They announced that things are back to normal via Twitter post.
Login has stabilized. We encountered a large DDoS upon restarting web services. We will resume trading at 02:00 UTC (in 7 minutes).
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) August 22, 2018
From that point on, everything seemingly went back to the way it used to be, and even Bitcoin left its new price and started sliding down to the old one. Surprisingly enough, it did not go all the way down to $6,450. Instead, it currently remains at $6,683.54, with it, as well as the majority of other coins, trading in the green.
