Coinbase, the leading U.S. platform for buying and selling major digital currencies, said twice on Tuesday that transactions in ethereum were "temporarily disabled."

In the morning New York time, Coinbase said buys and sells of ethereum and litecoin were temporarily disabled. That issue was resolved around noon ET. But by 2:04 p.m., Coinbase said on its status website that ethereum buys and sells were temporarily disabled again, before resolving the problem within 45 minutes.

The company did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on the latest halt in transactions. Earlier, a spokesperson for Coinbase said in a statement that "the site is seeing high traffic volume at the moment and some users may be experiencing intermittent service outages."

Ethereum seven-day performance

Source: CoinMarketCap

Coinbase's GDAX exchange website also said there is a "partially degraded service," as of 2:38 p.m.

Ethereum briefly surged more than 23 percent Tuesday to a record high of $637.62, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin spiked more than 5 percent to a high of $17,615.47, according to CoinDesk's bitcoin price index.