San Francisco-based Kraken, a long-standing digital asset exchange will this week provide a major systems update in order to meet the demand and load on its servers. With the increase in bitcoin prices came elevated trading which has put a strain on systems.

This has been the case for other exchanges as well including companies such as BitMEX, Coinbase, Gemini Exchange, and countless others. Earlier this year the company even delisted certain assets and sharpened the quotes on its system in order to reduce system load.

So starting this week Kraken gladly informed they will be rolling out a major systems upgrade which should resolve such issues such as scaling and load. The upgrade is long overdue stated Kraken, but has been mainly delayed by the distraction of resources toward the endless spur of the moment efforts required to deal with the heavy load of transactions on its system.

The company said:

“The recent, unexpected explosion in demand has been overwhelming. Each of the past few days has produced 50,000 new account registrations and 10,000 new support tickets — an order of magnitude above where we were just last quarter. Concurrent users, daily trades, and volumes are also hitting new all-time highs. We are struggling to keep up. Kraken.com performance is extremely degraded and unreliable. Clients can expect severe latency and difficulty interacting with all web and API services. Requests will frequently timeout and fail. At the moment, the only solution is to wait and try again later.”

The team also cautioned current users that there is currently no phone support with several reports of phishing attempts through fraudulent Kraken support phone numbers advertised on the Internet. As always, Kraken will never ask users for passwords nor will ever ask to install any software.

UPDATE: 12/23 – Regarding progress on the upgrade work being undertaken to enhance exchange performance, the Kraken team announced the following:

“We have made significant progress in the last week with the system upgrades and have realized moderate improvement in performance. Unfortunately, we were not able to complete all of the upgrades and the most impactful measures are yet to come. For the time being, systems should still be considered degraded and unreliable. Our team is working through the weekend and holidays to accelerate our timeline. We’ll give you another update toward the end of next week.”

“Thank you for your patience and happy holidays!”