Binance Down: System Maintenance Keeps Trading Platfrom Offline For Full Day

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance shut down its trading platform without notice Wednesday in order to perform an unannounced “system maintenance .” The service will not allow trading to occur again until Friday morning.

When Binance first made public the maintenance effort, it told users to expect the exchange to be fully operational again within 12 hours. That expected downtime quickly ballooned due to unexpected technical difficulties and has resulted in the trading platform being entirely unavailable for more than 24 hours.

According to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the problems have stemmed from a server issue that has caused data to become out of sync. The company has promised that no data was lost and has worked to resync the information, but each issue has added additional wait time to the process.

“Sorry guys, not something we want either,” Zhao wrote on Twitter . “We didn't have a choice, other than trying to fix it as soon as possible for our users. One of our team literally threw up after the calculation arrived at 10 hours.”

Binance users—who are now stuck holding onto all of their assets for more than 24 hours during one of the most tumultuous times in the short history of cryptocurrency—have been less than pleased with the increasing delays with the platform.

A number of users have taken to social media, posting on Twitter and Reddit to air their grievances with the trading platform. “Disgraceful behaviour Binance; you have cost a lot of people a lot of money. This is unacceptable,” one user on Reddit commented .

Others have started to spread conspiracy theories about the real cause of the outage, with ideas ranging from a crash or software or hardware related issue to a potential hack that the company is trying to hide.

It's disappointing that this is obviously a software or hardware fault and they are pretending it is maintenance. That's dishonest, things go wrong, a strong and honest management team would just admit it and not try to cover up,” a user on Reddit wrote . “Now people will lose faith in the Binance management. Why should I believe anything they say after this obvious lie?”

It’s worth noting that there is thus far no indication that Binance has lied about the maintenance effort or the technical difficulties that appear to have befallen the platform throughout the process.

Binance is often touted as the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world—though it currently ranks second in terms of volume of trading according to CoinMarketCap . Regardless its rank, the platform has hundreds of thousands of users who login every day with the intention to buy, sell and trade cryptocurrency.

Lack of access at inopportune times has been an issue for many of the top cryptocurrency exchanges in recent months. Bitfinex has gone down on a semi-regular basis, often as the result of supposed denial of service attacks and Coinbase has become notorious for experiencing service outages during spikes and drops in the market.