With only roughly 2 weeks left before the halving arrives, Bitcoin (BTC) surged past $9000 on April 30 for the first time since March 7, 2020. It currently trades at roughly $8950 - and as more investors are getting into the market in anticipation of a price rally, major US-based cryptocurrency Coinbase had both its regular and professional trading platforms experience “partially degraded services” on April 29, a a notice on Coinbase Pro indicates.

Coinbase said that it had already begun fixing the issue, in a notice saying that "a fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results. The Coinbase Pro web and mobile apps are experiencing connectivity issues." The exchange’s website, mobile app and API have all experienced outages. The exchange also said that the outage did not affect trading,

[The outage] only affected customers’ ability to access Coinbase and Coinbase Pro UIs, and did not impact trading via our APIs or the health of the underlying markets.

This is not surprising, as heavy activity has caused exchanges to experience downtime in the past, including popular derivatives platform BitMEX and BitStamp. Coinbase itself experienced an outage when the market swung the other way in March 2020 during “Black Thursday.”

Bitcoin's price began rallying on April 29, peaking at $9440 on April 30. Source.

Bitcoin’s price began surging on April 29, just 2 weeks before the halving, which many are hoping will contribute to a long term price rally. Although it is down from its recent high of roughly $9,500, sitting at approximately $8850 at the time of publishing, the rally sees many investors hopeful of new support levels being obtained. BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes has said that he expects Bitcoin to hit $20,000 in 2020, despite the crash in March.