Bitcoin price took a dive early this morning from it's new record high of $3015 to as low as $2200 on some exchanges. However the dive worsened when coinbase.com a major exchange took a dive with it.
Coinbase website shut down for a few hours as we can see from the chart above, and this notice below is all you could get.
This did not go easy on coinbase customers who went to the social media outlets to scream foul. This resembled pretty much what happened to Poloniex a few weeks ago.
Big exchanges going down at a time of heavy trading and big movement in price up or down, can cause a lot of damage.
As soon as coinbase re-opened the price went down a little and started on some recovery. This shows how much one big exchange blackout can influence Bitcoin price.
This happened before and will happen again, servers go down. So what would you do in a situation like this?
If you are a coinbase customer there is nothing you could do but wait, however, customers on other exchanges do not have to wait. They will go on trading the ups and downs like usual. You need to be careful though, some times having the ability to trade in such a volatile situation is not always great, if you are influenced by FUD you might make the big mistakes.
When your exchange is down, take a break and evaluate. Study what happens carefully, this might be a lesson for you to know what to do when it happens again, and it will. It does not have to be Coinbase or Poloniex, any exchange going down will influence the market and your trading.