The Kraken Carcrash Continues: Platform Rolled out with More Errors

Yesterday we brought you the news that Kraken was angering traders by taking their platform off for a number of hours. The initial outage was not announced prior to this and many traders were left in the dark.

Moreover, when there was communication from the Kraken team, it was short and lacked any details. This inevetibly raised some concerns about the security of the site given the complete lack of professionalism that followed.

Now, it seems that Kraken Exchange seems to finally be online. They sent an email to all of their traders letting them know that they could continue trading on their "upgraded" platform for zero fees on leveraged trades.

Unfortunately for everyone, the much anticipated roll-out of an updated system was a bit of a disaster.

"Worse than Before"

Despite the fact that Kraken was out for over 48 hours, the update that was rolled out a few hours ago is riddled with errors. Some pricing pairs were off with some currencies such as Dogecoin and Ethereum priced at way above their market level.

Moreover, traders were incensed to find out that they would not be able to withdraw the funds. Kraken said that they had disabled this feature for over 12 hours. This did not put many people at ease as they realised that deposits were still up and running.

The errors that used to plague Kraken were now cropping up again on the trading interface and the site still responded at a snail’s pace for loading particular pages.

Unprofessional Roll-out Slammed

The response from the community about the outage was no doubt quite severe. There were many who questioned the rational of rolling out updates to a trading platform in a live environment before substantial testing in an offline one.

Moreover, the fact that the update was not planned and that the developers did not give an appropriate timeline further angered them. Similarly, in the period when they were out, users were not able to access their balance and see the coins that they had on the exchange.

This is indeed what sparked concerns of an exchange hack. With the dark days of the Mt Gox hack fresh in the mind of many, you can understand the cautious attitudes many traders had when it comes to funds on any exchange.

Final Straw for Many

By taking a look at many of the comments on numerous forums and across social media, many users are treating this as the final straw when it comes to their money and trading at Kraken.

Although there have been performance issues at Kraken for some time, the lack of communication and unprofessionalism that they have used to handle this latest update has many calling quits. There has also been no communication from the CEO, Jesse Powell, about the status of Kraken.

Moreover, the fact that they have brought the site back online now but without withdrawals enabled has further enraged traders. There were many who immediately tried to withdraw their funds when the exchange came back online.

Of course, this is still ongoing and the official timeline of 12 hours for withdrawal has not passed yet. One can only speculate as to how many traders will follow through and completely abandon Kraken.

Of course, this is unfortunate for an exchange that could be making great returns in a market that is facing unprecedented demand. Kraken is also considered much of an institution in the crypto space as one of the oldest exchanges and may still have some goodwill.

One can only hope that they are able to process withdrawals quickly and efficiently and that some of those traders that have left will come back once it has proved worthy of their trust.