Cryptocurrency Exchange Kraken is still down nearly 48 hours after the site has launched a system upgrade. The Kraken engineers had estimated that the downtimes would only be two hours. Just like Gilligan's three-hour cruise that went horribly wrong, Kraken users on the Internet rage during stoppages and ask difficult questions

Beset by problems

] Significant growth pains in the last year, as the interest in cryptocurrency has grown exponentially. Coinbase and Bitstamp were overwhelmed by user traffic, resulting in delays. Bitfinex has been hit by DDOS attacks and recently had to stop recording for new users due to overwhelming demand. Binance and Bittrex have also halted new user registrations.

However, Kraken has undoubtedly suffered the most problems of all major exchanges. Users, including myself, have experienced multiple login errors and extraordinary difficulties placing and canceling orders. It is sometimes necessary to refresh the Kraken page 10-15 times before you can perform an action. Many users complained that Kraken posted their orders several times (after telling them that their order had failed initially), sometimes costing them thousands of dollars.

Update to fix everything.

encouraged Kraken users to go elsewhere, it is not always easy. US users are particularly limited in the exchanges that they can use, especially with Bitfinex who dropped them last year. For some altcoins, American traders can only use Kraken to exchange them for fiat. Similarly, Kraken is one of the only markets where American residents can make Bitcoin long or short

These users were delighted when, on December 15, Kraken announced a major upgrade to resolve site usability issues:

"Kraken.com's performance is extremely degraded and unreliable and customers can expect severe latency and hard-to-find difficulties. 39, interaction with all web services and APIs Applications will often be expired and will fail.For the moment, the only solution is to wait and try again later. Next week we will put in place a major upgrade of the systems that should solve these scaling and loading problems.The upgrade is long overdue and has been significantly delayed by the diversion of resources. The prolonged fire effort required to cope with the last months of relentless growth. "

Two hours, maybe more

The upgrade planned for the third week of December was postponed twice, before finally starting on January 10 at 21 Pacific Standard Time The Kraken status page set up for the upgrade indicated:

"We are upgrading the system on Thursday, January 11th around 5:00 am UTC (Wednesday, January 10th at 9:00 pm PT). Kraken's services will be disconnected for about 2 hours during the update, perhaps longer.

Kraken continued to update the status page, complaining of late starts, slowly than expected, and finally announced that the upgrade was in its final phase. , before publishing "a number of problems" in their "final test." Kraken does not understand why this "final test" would have been done on production servers.

About a day after the start of the two-hour upgrade, Kraken posted:

"We are making progress on the few remaining issues but we have no launch time yet. We intend to cancel out-of-date orders (and possibly all) and to suspend the liquidations when the service resumes. More details to follow soon. Thank you for your patience.

It's unclear exactly how this will work The price of bitcoin and altcoins has of course changed over the past two days, and no one knows exactly how Kraken will prevent people from losing money on long and short positions that could have been closed if the exchange had worked properly.

The most amazing of all, about 36 hours after the start of the upgrade Kraken apparently sent their engineers home to take a nap! Kraken writes:

"We are close, but rather than launching ourselves immediately before the team's exit, we let's push a bit to rest and be able to better monitor systems and react to problems. launch. Unfortunately, it means several hours late. "

At the time of going to press, Kraken is still without ETA for the resumption of trade, and the exchange has not responded to our requests for comment.