Bitcoin Derivatives Exchange BitMEX Experiences Issues

  • It took roughly an hour for BitMEX’s security team to bring the platform back online, though in cancel mode only.
  • Days before the outage, the exchange was hit with a major lawsuit, from the same company that sued Ripple.

Bitcoin (BTC) derivatives exchange BitMEX went down earlier today due to a trading engine failure, trading on the platform was resumed around 13:40 UTC.

BitMEX, formerly the largest Bitcoin derivatives exchange as measured by open interest, went down around 12:13 UTC, according to the platform’s status page. The trading engine was turned offline at around 12:28 UTC, when the exchange upgraded the incident to a “major outage”. Twenty minutes later the platform informed their users, tweeting:

BitMEX then released an update, around 25 minutes after the announcement, confirming that “all funds are safe, delayed orders will be rejected, and no liquidations will occur during the downtime”. At 13:30 UTC, the platform finally went back online, though it was in cancel mode only, meaning no new orders could be placed at the time.

The last time BitMEX went down was in March, when the exchange suffered an “aggressive DDoS” attack which temporarily brought it offline. According to the post-mortem of the incident, BitMEX’s security team took only 25 minutes to resolve the underlying issue.

The unexpected outage occurred only days after the company was hit with a major lawsuit, which was filed by the same firm that sued FTX and Ripple, Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement. The plaintiff has accused the exchange’s parent company, HDR Global Trading, and its senior executives, of perpetrating a vast racketeering conspiracy designed to reap billions in illegal profit.

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