Leading Crypto Exchange Reports Outage for Several Hours with Deposits and Withdrawals Affected – Here’s What Happened

OKX has released an update regarding its recent outage that lasted for more than seven hours, saying that it was due to hardware issues with its cloud service provider.

On December 18, the cryptocurrency exchange was hit with an outage that hindered customers from opening or closing a trade and processing withdrawals for several hours. The platform said on Twitter at the time:

There is currently an intermittent connection error with our cloud provider which is affecting the user experience. Our dev team is resolving it with them. Funds are safe. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. 🙏

— OKX (@okx) December 18, 2022

To address the incident, OKX released an announcement today saying that the outage was due to hardware issues with its cloud service provider. “On Dec 18th, 2022 UTC, our systems experienced a hardware issue with our cloud service provider that led to an outage on our platform,” the exchange said. 

OKX claimed that all user funds are safe. Furthermore, to ensure this doesn’t happen again in the future, the exchange says it will move away from reliance on a single cloud provider. It added:

“Our engineering teams are implementing a multicloud deployment strategy to ensure our core services can be deployed on multiple clouds so this does not happen again.”

The exchange had revealed that its cloud service provider was Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, which experienced a system failure on Sunday. 

Aside from OKX, other major websites were also affected, including websites and apps at the Monetary Authority of Macau, Galaxy Macau hotel, Lotus TV Macau, and food delivery platform MFood, according to a report by South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.

Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, has been a market leader in Asia as the largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider by revenue, and the third largest worldwide, for four consecutive years through to 2021, according to market researcher Gartner.

The incident sent shock waves across the crypto industry as centralized exchanges are currently under the spotlight amid the recent meltdown of FTX, once the third-largest cryptocurrency in the world that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early November. 

Prior to OKX, Gate.io, another crypto exchange, announced its users might experience delays in their deposits and withdrawals due to intermittent connection interruption, suggesting that it was also dependent on Alibaba Cloud.