Kraken posted last week that it was planning to go offline for system upgrades on Wednesday, January 10, at approximately 9:00 p.m.—a reasonable period of downtime when fewer users are likely trading cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately for Kraken, its tiny window of downtime blew up into an issue that kept the exchange offline for more than two days.
“We are still working to track down an elusive bug which is holding up launch. This bug did not appear in our many weeks of testing and only emerged in the production environment. Unfortunately, it is not consistently reproducible and we cannot launch until this issue is resolved. To reiterate our earlier statement: stale (and possibly all) orders will be canceled, and liquidations will be paused before trading is resumed,” reads Kraken’s status update during its unexpected downtime.
While the company claims that its upgrade ultimately benefits its customers, it’s nevertheless apologizing and offering zero-fee trading throughout the month of January to make up for the disruption. It’s currently working to bring withdrawals back online, which the company disabled for 12 hours so it could monitor its new system for any errors.
Customers should be able to start making cryptocurrency withdrawals around 5:00 (PT) today. Fiat or cryptocurrency deposits initiated around the large stretch of downtime could take up to two additional days to be credited to a user’s account.
