The cryptocurrency market is amidst mass panic due to the concerns regarding the Coronavirus outbreak. Bitcoin fell below $6000 and the altcoin market has taken a heavy beating as well with tokens down more than 40%. Cryptocurrency exchanges are seeing heavy traffic as more and more investors try to cash out.

Heavy traffic is also resulting in outages across major exchanges over the past month. Since the start of 2020, there have been multiple cases of popular crypto exchanges going down without notice. One such trading platform that has been suffering quite a lot, is a popular stock exchange Robinhood, also gaining popularity as a cryptocurrency trading hub.

There have been some malfunctions on the platform lately and this has got customers worried. According to a Bloomberg report, the exchange drew its entire $200 million credit facility from Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., due to concerns regarding the coronavirus outbreak.

The heavy market volatility has resulted in some significant system malfunction in the exchange and it has already suffered two consecutive outages in a row. Customers have also been reporting significant downtime. Earlier this month, Robinhood experienced a day-long outage that almost rendered the exchange inoperable across multiple platforms. Customers were unable to complete their orders and view their balances.

Reports suggested that the outage was the result of a rise in trading volume, but the company did not link the issue with trading volumes.

As of now, the company hasn’t mentioned anything about how they plan on utilizing the credit line, but investors are getting worried. David Ritter, a Bloomberg analyst believes this is not a good sign. Ritter said:

“Companies don’t tap their credit line unless they need to, perhaps not a good signal with regard to their cash burn, which could make creditors nervous.”

However, it was noted that the exchange started going dark multiple times starting the day it tapped the credit line. The exchange has noted that the heavy load caused the Domain Name System (DNS) to fail. Furthermore, the company also clarified that the decision to draw credit was dated before the market started to drop and is completely unrelated to the said outages.

The industry suffers

Robinhood isn’t the only major cryptocurrency exchange that has been suffering in recent times. Earlier this month, two of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, OKEx and Bitfinex had taken some unexpected downtime. Both platforms were hit with distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS). OKEx was the first to go down on February 27, with Bitfinex going offline the following day.

World’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, also took some unexpected downtime and suspended trading. Despite the unannounced downtime, Binance still managed to address the situation swiftly to avoid any kind of FUD.