Unexpected Maintenance — Expected Action by PrimeXBT

PrimeXBT recently experienced unexpected maintenance and had to restrict access to certain users, partially due to an outage of a third-party partner service provider — AWS Amazon Cloud. In the interest of transparency, we wanted to share information on what occurred, why this happened, and what steps were taken to protect PrimeXBT clients.

Common Challenges All Technology Businesses Face

Highly technological companies depend on external third-party service providers regularly to conduct business as usual. These external service providers vary greatly depending on each individual businesses’ unique needs, however, the most common external service tech companies rely on are hosting services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

These services are widely used across all business categories, and all businesses using these services are susceptible to outages at no fault of their own. No exchange or business for that matter, can claim to offer a 100% stable service all of the time. 99.9% is possible, but 100% uptime is never possible, for any company in the world. And this is something that everyone using online services needs to understand and accept.

Because no businesses are safe from such an outage from occurring, the next most important aspect of any situation of this magnitude is how each platform handles such outage.

PrimeXBT always takes a responsible approach, providing transparency to our users through both social media alerts and through a real-time status update page that informs users of any potential downtime or unexpected maintenance or outages. Importantly, PrimeXBT’s quality control team evaluates each case individually and takes a fair and responsible approach while making a decision to compensate clients.

Unexpected Maintenance Explained: External Feed Issue

On August 23, an outage at AWS Amazon Cloud affected a number of top cryptocurrency exchanges globally. Connectivity disruption resulted a flash crash on cryptocurrency prices across multiple order books and took BTC pair down to $0.32 as reported by Coindesk.

Since PrimeXBT trading infrastructure is aggregating external feed from multiple liquidity providers — incorrect market data caused an isolated inconsistency in PrimeXBT order matching engine. Thousands of orders and positions were affected due to such inaccurate external pricing. Binance even had to suspend deposits and withdrawals due to todays issues with AWS.

Once the issue was identified, PrimeXBT had to restrict access to the trading platform to investigate further and quarantine any unexpected behavior.

After initial investigation, all unaffected users regained access to the platform and could use the platform’s functionality to the fullest. However, all affected users were still restricted from entering the platform until the issue was fully resolved.

In matter of hours, all orders that have been executed inaccurately during the disruption were rolled back, and incorrectly closed positions will be restored to their previous state. Account balances were also corrected to represent the actual state as if there would be no issue occurred.

Our team has taken all necessary measures and adjusted the external feed filter on the trading engine in order to prevent such issues from happening again.

PrimeXBT: Committed to Customer Service and Satisfaction

On July 2, a similar incident had arisen due to an outage at Cloudflare, a CDN and DNS provider. The outage at Cloudflare was responsible for customers being unable to access a number of cryptocurrency related services, including exchange and popular price aggregation platform CoinMarketCap.

Back in 2018, Coinbase experienced a flash crash on Ethereum which resulted a drop from $100 to $13.

These examples show that no trading platform or company no matter the reputation is immune to issues stemming from external services.

Here at PrimeXBT, we understand that issues such as this latest disruption due to an external service provider, are unavoidable, and therefore, prompt action must always be taken and customer communication must be handled with care. Our team of developers responded by taking immediate action, and our friendly 24/7 support staff were available to field customer requests provide status updates to alleviate any concerns.

Customers are welcome to contact our customer support team if they experience any additional issues or have any concerns. For real-time updates, be sure to bookmark and check our trading platform status update page, at https://status.primexbt.com/, and follow official Twitter account.