On Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance suffered its first outage since December 2021. A look back at the causes of this incident, which has since been fully resolved.
Binance suffers its first outage since 2021
Friday at 12:27 p.m. Paris time, Binance’s spot trading services suffered their first outage since December 2021. This quickly spread to other services on the platform, which shut down deposits and withdrawals temporarily as a precautionary measure. By 3 p.m., Binance’s services were back to normal.
On Twitter, the cryptocurrency exchange as well as its CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) kept users updated on the situation as the incident was resolved.
In fact, it turns out that the bug was caused by an unusual trailing stop, which triggered a failure in the order matching system. This system matches buy and sell orders to make trading services work.
At Binance, this system performs a snapshot every hour to make backups, but the said incident occurred three minutes before the next snapshot, which required more time than expected to get back into service :
” It is important to note that this was an internal issue and not an external cause. Although our engines take snapshots every hour, this bug occurred 57 minutes later, affecting the repair time. “
CZ puts the situation in perspective
The time of repairs, CZ indulged in a historical anecdote between two tweets on the failure, explaining that the origin of the word bug would come from the fact that in the 1940s, it was necessary to “remove the bugs” that sought heat in the components of the first computers, which could then cause short circuits:
A little trivia while we wait. Debugging. In the 1940s, when “chip” circuits still use big transistors. Insects often get in (because it’s warm) and short circuit things. Engineers have to periodically remove the bugs, thus debugging.
– CZ Binance (@cz_binance) March 24, 2023
This anecdote seems to refer to the story of the computer scientist Grace Hopper who was confronted with a malfunction caused by a moth that came to lodge in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer on September 9, 1947. The bug was preserved in a notebook identifying it as the “first actual case of a bug found”, but in reality, the use of this term would be older than that, as Thomas Edison himself would have used the word.
In any case, Binance’s services quickly resumed normal operation and this episode would not have put the funds of the platform’s customers at risk. For its part, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has not been particularly impacted by the news, currently trading around $ 27,800.
