The famous online trading platform eToro is now back online following a technical problem that led to a global outage in the middle of a sell-off of cryptocurrencies. eToro started to gain popularity during the pandemic.
The platform had been unavailable to users since yesterday and only came back online this morning.
The chief solutions officer of eToro, Tuval Chomut, declared that the outage was not a result of “a breach or an attack on our systems.”
“The reason for the service disruption was a technical issue that affected our Microsoft database and we were forced to move the platform into maintenance mode,” he commented.
“We worked hand in hand with senior engineers at Microsoft to identify and resolve the issue, but this took longer than any of us would have wanted.”
The company revealed that it would start introducing temporary changes in order to deal with the increased demand.
“We will be raising the minimum first-time deposit amount to $1,000 effective immediately and increasing the minimum copy value to $500. We will also be temporarily removing the option to request future market entry orders,” Chomut declared.
“These are unprecedented times both in terms of the market conditions and eToro’s growth. We have more and more new users coming to the platform each day, a huge increase in trading volumes, and strong growth in our users’ engagement with the feed and other aspects of our social investment community.”
“This means that when things go wrong more people are affected and we take this responsibility very seriously. We want to assure you that providing frictionless trading and investing experience is our highest priority.”
eToro’s user base grew by close to a third in 2020 alone. It is known for letting users trade shares using their smartphones.
This crashed coincided with Bitcoin traders leading a sell-off in the crypto market. Since yesterday, the market has registered a drop of 14%. This was led by Bitcoin, which has a share of 60% of the crypto market by value.