On Tuesday (January 15th), New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia announced that on Monday it had “suffered a security breach which resulted in significant losses.”

Cryptopia is a leading digital asset exchange in New Zealand with over two million users.

At press time (10:15 UTC on January 15th), this was the image that greeted visitors to Cryptopia’s website:

The first tweet that Cryptopia sent out regarding this outage came at 06:55 UTC on January 14th, although at that time Cryptopia did not explain the reason for this “unscheduled maintenance”:

We are currently experiencing an unscheduled maintenance, we are working to resume services as soon as possible. We will keep you updated. — Cryptopia Exchange (@Cryptopia_NZ) January 14, 2019

However, at 08:00 UTC on January 15th, Cryptopia did finally announce via Twitter that it had been hacked the day before, that it had alerted New Zealand Police, and that it had gone into maintenance mode (with all trading suspended):

Here was the reaction from Adel de Meyer, Co-Founder of “The Crypto Collectors” and “DAPS Project”:

Sorry to hear about this unfortunate event kicking off 2019. Thanks for the transparency and I'm still proud of calling you a partner as I know the team and how committed you are in delivering a great service. Hope you can get it resolved soon on top of the ETH fork upgrade. 💜 — Adel de Meyer (@AdeldMeyer) January 15, 2019

And this is what Ran NeuNer, the host of CNBC Africa’s “Crypto Trader” show, said in a tweet about the hacking of Cryptopia:

“I’m interested to see how the Cryptopia hack plays out, how much was lost & whether they were negligent in storage. Will they be able to refund users given their size & the state of the market. I suspect many smaller exchanges won’t survive this and the bigger ones will benefit! “

We will update this article as the story develops and more news becomes available.

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pexels.com