The famous cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex had to pause trading activities on Tuesday morning after experiencing an attack on the platform. Apparently, the attack caused extreme load on the servers and caused an outage.

Bitfinex Experiences a Cyber Attack

The company wrote in twitter that they were experiencing an ‘extreme load’ during the morning (US times). At the same time, they informed that they were going to investigate the issue to keep all the customers informed about the situation.

Bitfinex is currently under extreme load. We are investigating the issue and will keep you all up to date as we learn more. — Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018

The company wrote on its website:

“The cause of the outage has been identified. A DDoS attack was launched soon after we restarted operations. The previous outage was caused by issues with one of our infrastructure providers. While the platform was recovering, the attack caused extreme load on the servers.”

Some time later, they informed that the platform was already operating normally and that they were going to be monitoring the situation very closely so as to avoid further problems.

After the information, Bitcoin (BTC) lost $300 dollars in a matter of minutes – which is not unusual in the cryptocurrency market. Other virtual currencies reacted in a similar way to Bitcoin. Now, the most important cryptocurrency is registering a 1.12% increase compared to 24 hours ago.

At the moment of writing this article, Bitfinex is the 4th most important virtual currency exchange by trading volume wit $450 dollars traded in the last 24 hours.

Other Important Crypto Hacks

This year, two important virtual currency exchanges, one in Japan and another in Italy have been hacked. We are talking about Coincheck and BitGrail respectively.

Coincheck experienced a hack that resulted in a loss of 523 million NEM coins, which at that time were worth around $500 million dollars.

At the same time, BitGrail, lost $195 million dollars after losing 17 million NANO tokens, which at that time were called RaiBlocks (XRB).