Binance, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, announced yesterday that they will be closing their services for 12 hours.

The exchange went offline several hours ago and its trading services are still unavailable due to maintenance works.

Binance administration assured panicked users that the shutdown was not due to any data loss, claiming that some technical issues were to blame for the stoppage.

The following message appeared on the Binance support page:

”Due to a significant increase in users and trading activity, Binance will need to extend the System upgrade and is expected to be completed by 2PM (UTC).

Our team is working hard to complete this upgrade as quickly as possible. We will make an announcement to all users if completed ahead of schedule.

Withdrawals and trading during this period will remain suspended. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience.”

Zhao Cheng Peng, the CEO of Binance tweeted that the outage was because of some server issues.

” We experienced a server issue on our replica database cluster, causing some data to be out of sync. Need to fully resync from master. Due the size of the data, it will take several hours. No data is lost. We appreciate your understanding and support.”

Two hours after this post, he released another statement on Twitter, stating that the delay may take another 10 hours before the exchange comes back online. Meanwhile, there will be a 30-minute window which will be let people withdraw their funds.

Binance is supposed to return online by 2 pm GMT. Users have expressed their concern regarding the prices that will be quoted once the exchange will be back up, but the exchange’s administration promised to let them cancel their orders in the half hour window before trading operations resume.

Some worry the exchange will be down for longer, seeing as Kraken’s routine maintenance in January lasted 3 days instead of a few hours as they initially stated. But the Binance team have assured that all is under control and the service will be back up as scheduled.