Breaking News: Less than an hour ago, exchange giant Binance announced that they were closing the doors for the next 12 hours. A system upgrade extension was cited as the reason.
Anxious traders responded to the company Tweet in the hope that the exchange had not been hacked and no data was lost. They were reassured by the company:
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.
— CZ (@cz_binance) February 8, 2018
Just shortly after the following message appeared on the Binance support pages;
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.
Binance is one of the largest exchanges in the world, if not the largest. According to CoinMarketCap, it has over $ 2 billion in 24-hour trade volume and 190 currencies and tokens. The outage may worry those who suffered in the recent exchange hack in Japan but the Binance team have assured that it is all under control.