Bitfinex Temporarily Closes Down Operations

Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange service based in Hong Kong recently announced its temporary closure to all users, regardless of general improvements in the crypto market. The announcement left many people, especially its customers, a little confused about whether or not they should be worried about funds on the platform.

The Announcement

This announcement was made on Twitter and it originally expressed that the service will only be accessible to some users. Bitfinex then apologized for any problems or inconvenience caused. The exchange however did not give any reason for the shutdown.

Much later, after about half an hour, the platform explained on Twitter, that the inaccessibility would be experienced by all its users and not only a few users as the initial announcement claimed. They blamed the resulting confusion from its users on their own bad word choice.

The announcement said:

“We apologise for our previous tweet. In the rush to make users aware of our issue promptly, we were poor in the choice of wording. We can confirm Bitfinex is offline to all users. Please be assured that funds are safe. We will communicate here with further updates.”

Following this announcement, Bitfinex became unavailable for all of its users for a period lasting over two hours and then came back up again. The exchange then announced that it had resumed its services full without any problem.

Reason for Shutdown

Bitfinex has now explained that the service had to be shut down temporarily due to issues surrounding general connectivity. A part of the statement said

“The issue that caused this downtime was attributed to connectivity. Our team identified and responded to the situation immediately and worked unremittingly to bring full service back as quickly as feasibly possible. Your safety is our top priority and we can confirm that all funds were safe during this period.”

About Bitfinex

Presently, Bitfinex is rated as the 18th biggest crypto exchange in the world. This is rated by trade volumes as they are measured daily.

Also, an Exchange Security Report was recently released by independent researchers and analysts and this report scored 16 percent of all the biggest crypto trading platforms in the world with an A rating. The analysts’ report was based on a study of 135 difference crypto platforms and then placed Bitfinex as the 5th most protected and secure exchange platform in the world. Bitfinex was given an A- rating but the report did not award any platform with an A+ rating.

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