Bitcoin Alert: Mt.Gox Not a Victim of DDoS – Here’s What Happened
If you have Bitcoins and you’ve been religiously watching Mt.Gox for days, you probably got too excited when the value hit $200 — and it kept rising.
But as the day pushed on, you probably noticed that something out of the ordinary was happening over at Mt.Gox – things started to lag. You immediately think: “OMFG! Mt.Gox is being hacked! What will happen to my BTC?!”
Before you panic and start trading all your BTCs, better hear the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth.
“First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success,” Mt.Gox posted on its Google+ page.
Now you can breathe.
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So what the hell happened?
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Mt.Gox stated that the lag was due to the “astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days,” plus the fact that it already has a huge number of actively trading members. When things started to lag, people panicked and started to sell BTC en mass, which resulted in increased trading activity that eventually led to the freezing of the trade engine.
To better understand what happened, MT.Gox posted some impressive numbers. The number of trades tripled in the last 24 hours, 25,000 new accounts were opened between March and April, and roughly 20,000 new accounts are created each day.
Because of the increased activity and new accounts made, Mt.Gox will continue to release several updates today and in the coming days to improve performance. It also warns that the system may be down for two hours within the next 12-24 hours as it adds new servers to its system.
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