BitMEX announces: Services back to normal after DDoS attack

BitMEX, a Bitcoin mercantile exchange platform and one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that they were under a DDoS attack 22nd August. The exchange platform is popular in the market for its leverage services. The attack took place while the platform was undergoing a maintenance update.

BitMEX announced on Twitter:

“Services are back to normal. Combination of DDoS and price action caused heavy load on data mirrors. Trading and marketdata feed response times remained normal while data fetches were slow. We are scaling that system and moving it out of the critical path of login.”

The attack led to a huge buzz in the cryptocurrency market as it became a catalyst to the hike in Bitcoin [BTC]’s price. Bitcoin [BTC] had crossed the $6500 mark. Almost $11 billion was pumped into the cryptocurrency market.

It is believed that the jump in the price was because of the DDoS attack on BitMEX. The attack resulted in most of the short positions being liquidated on the platform. The platform had notified its customers that trading will be closed for 30 minutes at 1:00 PM UTC because of maintenance on 21st August 2018.

The price of Bitcoin shot up immediately when the platform closed down for maintenance. The trading service was supposed to be back on the exchange platform at 1:30 PM UTC in cancel only mode. Once the trading service was back, the customers complained that they were unable to access their accounts. After which, the platform announced that they will be closing the service for 5 more minutes. Proceeding this, they announced that they encountered a ‘large DDoS upon restarting web services’.

This eventually resulted in a lot of short positions liquidated in the platform and several customers even unable to access their accounts. Moreover, the short position was trading at their all-time high when the incident occurred. This also drove the market speculators believing that the cryptocurrency market price hike was the result of a short squeeze.

Furthermore, most of the users of the platform accused them of being a scam. The recent reports of BitMEX renting the world’s most expensive offices in Hong Kong acted as a catalyst to the allegations.

Custom Crypto, a Twitterati said:

“I guess yesterday maintenance was to improve it no? Guys if you need some expertise, you may consult with @binance @cz_binance”

Taicoin, another Twitterati said:

“… in addition, all profits through manipulation have been made. “Scratch that last part”. – Arthur Hayes”

NicePeter223 said:

“do not use bitmex, they had many upgrades but it is only upgrading from a shit system to a shittier system”