The trading engine for BitMEX, formerly the largest bitcoin derivatives exchange measured by open interest, went down on Tuesday at 12:13 UTC, according to the exchange’s status page.
BitMEX supported roughly $2.2 billion in bitcoin futures trading volume over the last 24 hours, according to Skew.
At 12:28 UTC, BitMEX updated the incident to a “major outage" and took the trading engine offline. During the incident, however, the website reported its API and web front end to be operational.
When reached for comment, BitMEX told CoinDesk its engineers are "investigating the issue to bring the platform back up as soon as possible."
In an update soon after publication of this article, the exchange said:
The BitMEX Trading Engine is currently down. We're working to bring it back online as soon as possible. We can confirm all funds are safe, delayed orders will be rejected, and no liquidations will occur during the downtime. On coming back online, there will be a cancel-only period initially.
Before Tuesday, BitMEX’s most recent outage came on March 13 when the exchange suffered a “aggressive DDoS” attack that temporarily took the exchange offline for 25 minutes, according to a postmortem.
Unlike the March incident, when bitcoin crashed to 12-month lows, bitcoin has stayed relatively stable dropping less than 1% from its daily open, according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index.