Kraken's crypto-exchange does not work for 48 hours after the service initiated the system update. Engineers Kraken estimated that the downtime will be only two hours. In the meantime, Kraken users are outraged by downtime and are asking difficult questions.
Almost all crypto-exchange exchanges faced serious problems last year, as interest in crypto-currencies increased exponentially. Coinbase and Bitstamp were overloaded with user traffic, which led to delays in servicing on the exchange. Bitfinex was hit by DDOS attacks , and recently it was necessary to stop registration for new users because of too much demand. Binance and Bittrex also suspended registration of new users.
However, Kraken is experiencing more problems than all the other crypto-exchanges . Users are faced with numerous connection errors and difficulties in placing and canceling orders. Sometimes it may be necessary to refresh the page 10-15 times before the user can perform the action. Many users complained that Kraken executed their trading applications several times after they were not initially performed , in some cases, as users claim, such problems cost them thousands of dollars.
Update
Although it seems that many Kraken users can continue their work in other places - everything is not so simple. US users are limited in the choice of sites that they can use, especially after Bitfinex refused to serve them last year. For trading some altcoyins, American traders can only use Kraken to trade against the currency. Similarly, Kraken is one of the markets where US residents can buy and sell bitcoins.
Users of this KBR were delighted when on December 15 Kraken announced a major update to fix the problems of usability:
The performance of Kraken is extremely degraded and unreliable. Clients can expect strong latency and complexity of interaction with all web services and API services. Requests will often fail and fail. At the moment, the only solution is to wait and try again later.
Next week we will implement a major system update, which should solve the problems of scaling and load. The update has been ready for a long time, a significant delay in its use arose from the processing of a large number of requests received in recent months.
Two hours, maybe longer
The update, scheduled for the third week of December, was postponed twice before finally starting January 10 at 9 pm Pacific Time. The Kraken update status page shows:
"We will perform the system update on Thursday, January 11, at about 5:00 UTC (Wednesday 10 January at 21:00 Pacific Time). Kraken services will be disabled for approximately 2 hours during the upgrade, perhaps longer."
Over the next two days, Kraken continues to update the status page, indicating that the update is slower than expected. Finally, the representatives said that the update was at the final stage before publishing a message stating that the "final testing" had been completed. Representatives of Kraken wrote about the "final testing" conducted on production servers, which is a very strange event.
About a day after the start of the two-hour upgrade, Kraken published:
"We have made progress with regard to the few remaining problems, but we do not yet have a definite start-up time. We intend to cancel obsolete (and, perhaps, all) orders and suspend the liquidation of trade orders after the resumption of service. More details on how this will happen will appear in the near future. Thank you for your patience."
It's unclear how this will work. The price of bitcoins and altcoins has, of course, changed over the past two days, and no one is sure how exactly Kraken will explain the loss of users due to the impossibility of closing and opening orders during all this time.
The most striking thing is - about 36 hours after the start of the update, Kraken , obviously, sent his engineers home to rest.
Kraken writes:
"We are close, but instead of starting work right away, we will rest a little to be able to better control the system and respond to problems that are possible immediately after launch. Unfortunately, this means a few more hours of delay."
At the time of writing, Kraken is still not working.