Traffic to Binance surges to record highs, site goes down for maintenance

Leading crypto asset exchange Binance was forced to suspend its spot and margin trading services just a few minutes after its CEO took to Twitter to boast the platform had smoothly handled new record highs for website traffic.

Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, tweeted the exchange had experienced a new all-time high for traffic on Feb.10, stating the platform had “handled the load” of a 60% increase in traffic on top of the previous day's record traffic. 

CZ also noted that new user sign-ups had tagged record highs: “New account registrations are still open, not sure for how long.”

The tweet has since been deleted, with Binance publishing a “notice of temporary system maintenance” roughly 30 minutes later. The exchange returned to normal operations roughly one hour after the notice was issued.

Only futures trading was able to continue operating as usual, with the exchange announcing it had “suspended deposits, withdrawals, spot and margin trading, P2P trading, OTC Portal trading, savings & redemption, as well as asset transfers from sub-accounts, margin accounts, futures accounts, and fiat wallets.”

CZ issued a follow-up tweet lamenting his original post after Binance’s maintenance notice had been published:

Disk issue with one cluster. Will be fixed shortly. Thank you for your understanding.

Should not have sent the last tweet. Slapping myself now.

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) February 11, 2021

According to website analytics team SimilarWeb, Binance was the 381st most-popular website worldwide during January, ranking third among websites featured in SimilarWeb’s “Finance > Investing” category.

Traffic from Turkey doubled during January to represent the single-largest geographical source of traffic for Binance, with Turkish users representing 6.89% of Binance’s 136 million monthly visitors. Russia ranked the second-largest source of traffic with 6.53%, followed by the U.S. with 5.11%, the U.K. with 4.70%, and France with 3.50%.