BTC-e was down briefly on Sunday, following a powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against its servers.
DDoS attacks against bitcoin exchanges have gained notoriety since the ‘massive and concerted’ attack which targeted multiple organisations earlier this year.
However, in the current climate of uncertainty even a harmless attack can be misinterpreted, with speculation spreading like wildfire on social media. Luckily BTC-e was quick to confirm the attack and dismiss fears – it was just another DDoS attack, now all too common in the world of bitcoin.
DDoS attack on our server
— BTC-E (@btcecom) April 13, 2014
Back to normal
At press time BTC-e was back up and running with more than 4,000 users online. The exchange told CoinDesk that DDoS attacks happen periodically and that there is nothing special about the latest one.
“Our networking team responded quickly and it is fixing the problem,” BTC-e said, adding:
“We don’t consider it as an important problem, as there is a workaround to fix it quickly.”
This was apparently a minor outage, with no security breach.
Non-DDoS technical issues
BTC-e has faced its fair share of technical issues not related to malicious activity. Back in December, the exchange suffered from lengthy processing delays which also led to concerns. BTC-e is operated by an anonymous team of Eastern European developers, hence many users were suspicious that some foul play was involved.
However, at the time the exchange told CoinDesk that the problems were the result of a sudden surge in the number of users. BTC-e has since hired more staff to cope with the extra workload and the exchange claims it has not face any more serious problems – aside from the occasional DDoS attack, of course.
The BTC-e team still insists on anonymity. However, judging by its market share, most users don’t seem to mind at all.