Coinbase suffers downtime amid traffic from Super Bowl

TL;DR Breakdown

  • Coinbase staged a marketing scheme on the US most popular sports game SuperBowl
  • The move attracted more traffic to the platform than expected causing a stir in its operations but was shortly fixed

Coinbase’s marketing initiative during Super Bowl became so popular that the exchange experienced an outage. Shortly after, the problem was solved. Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad pitched how easy it is to buy, sell and store cryptocurrency on its platform.

The Super Bowl upshorts

The public-traded cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, recently released its 30-second long commercial aimed at attracting new customers during the Super Bowl, one of the largest and most-watched broadcasts in American television history. Given the large audience at the Super Bowl, the exchange recorded a spike in users.

The ad was very well-received by the cryptocurrency community, many of whom have been waiting for a big company like Coinbase to advertise their product on such an enormous stage. The usual trickle of new users is expected in the wake of such advertising efforts. However, Coinbase experienced some issues during and after the Super Bowl that were likely caused by a large influx of new users.

Coinbase started experiencing issues a few hours before the Super Bowl began and experienced problems throughout Sunday night, including periods of downtime that lasted up to an hour, leading many to believe that it may have been caused by the high volume of traffic generated from their commercial during the Super Bowl. In addition, other platforms were also under heavy load and experienced downtime, such as the Philidelphia Eagles’ mobile app.

The issue was solved on Monday morning. It is unclear whether traders were affected by the outage, but it shows how many people are interested in investing or using cryptocurrencies with the exchange. This may indicate that cryptocurrency has found its way into the mainstream and has become a part of popular culture.

Coinbase went ahead, notifying its followers through tweets and a blog post regarding the incident. “You may be aware that earlier today we experienced some downtime across all Coinbase products due to heavy traffic and trading. Our engineering team has been working non-stop to resolve this issue and return site functionality for our customers.”