A rollercoaster ride of a week for Bitcoin has seen exchanges suffer outages as current and new users clamored to trade the sought-after virtual currency.

Popular exchange Coinbase and other exchanges saw a massive surge in the volume of traffic on their exchange - causing delays for users on their platforms.

Vast majority of traffic is being served but with slower performance. Our engineering team is actively working on this and should be fully resolved in a few hours — Coinbase (@coinbase) November 29, 2017

The exchange eventually had to schedule maintenance on its server in an effort to increase their capacity to meet the massive demand for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Popular South African exchange, Luno, also struggled to meet the massive volume of traders.

We are still experiencing extreme market volatility. Some customers may experience performance issues. We're really sorry about this. We'll keep you updated with the progress on https://t.co/L0cKVVwlhk — Luno (@lunomoney) November 30, 2017

Bitfinex also undertook server maintenance this week, and that prompted a DDOS attack which no doubt hampered trades on the platform.

Bitfinex is under DDoS attack. The DDoS attack started during earlier maintenance and has been ongoing since. — Bitfinex (@bitfinex) November 26, 2017

Bitstamp also struggled to cope with the demand for Bitcoin - and apologized to users on Twitter as they worked to resolve the issue caused by the spike in traffic.

Our performance issues have been resolved. We will continue to monitor the situation. Apologies for the inconvenience! — Bitstamp (@Bitstamp) November 29, 2017

Server issues leading to price volatility?

Having hit the $11,000 mark on Wednesday, Bitcoin’s value has been following a wave function.

There could be a number of reasons for this. Naturally, many investors may have cashed out when the virtual currency hit its biggest high to date.

Or perhaps the apparent correction, which many analysts predicted to come at much higher prices, is as a result of the difficulties experienced by major exchanges that were not quite prepared for the massive demand on their systems.

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