eToro system crash into second day as Bitcoin falls below $50K
Retail FX and CFDs broker eToro has been experiencing a severe system crash, which has now lasted more than 13 hours and extended into a second day on Wednesday.
eToro’s status page has continued to show that everything from customer login and registration, to trading, to platform and payments is “Under Maintenance”.
The problems began at about 15:14 GMT on Tuesday afternoon, following a day of heavy trading action and wild volatility in cryptocurrency prices. The social trading focused eToro is a very popular destination for retail clients to trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. At the time, cryptos were in the midst of a steep decline that saw Bitcoin tank by 20%, all the way from above $56K to about $45K, before recovering about halfway to just above $50K early Wednesday.
eToro has experienced a number of similar episodes recently – one occurred the previous day (Feb 22) and another in mid January – but most of those incidents were resolved by the company in minutes or a few short hours. The current incident, stretching into Day 2, is clearly more serious, and is still unresolved as of the time of writing.
As early as 15:14 GMT Tuesday eToro stated that it had identified the root cause of the issue, and that its developers were working to fix it. In the meantime the company posted that it enabled its Offline Trading tool to provide a way for clients to close positions; however clients were unable to log in and actually see what their positions were. As the incident poured into a second day eToro noted at 01:16 GMT early Wednesday that it was working with senior teams at Microsoft to resolve the issue.
In response to customer inquiries the company also tweeted: “We can assure our customers that our platform has not been compromised in any way.”
We understand that the wild action in cryptos and in Bitcoin particularly was accompanied by a large surge in trading volumes globally. Leading crypto exchange Kraken noted that on its system total spot crypto trading volume was $4.67 billion Tuesday, an all-time high, and 131% higher than the 30-day average of $2.02 billion. Total Kraken crypto futures notional trading was $1.93 billion, another all-time high.
A large number of eToro’s social media savvy clients were venting their frustrations on platforms such as Twitter, stating things such as “This is what shouldn’t happen on a day like this. Time to migrate elsewhere…. Can you recommend anther platform you think is more reliable? This renders eToro completely unfit for purpose. The purpose of trading stock is for moments like these… #etorodown-really????? 2 days in a row? Unable to add order, cancel order or even trade. You guys should be sued… This is not acceptable. You need to explain what technical difficulties you’re experiencing. After 4 hours you need to be more honest about what’s happening. You are just repeating the same status update. We need transparency #etorodown…”
Robinhoodtrader
February 24, 2021 @ 1:58 pm
this might be etoro’s ‘robinhood moment’ when traders start to realize they dont really care about the clients just making money. how many of the millions they raise they put into marketing and paying celebrities to pull in clients instead of investing in IT systems to serve the client?
Anonymous
March 19, 2021 @ 9:35 pm
5