OKX cryptocurrency exchange suspends its work

The OKX exchange has been down for at least 5 hours. A major panic was avoided thanks to a timely statement from the exchange’s representatives that the problem was not a liquidity issue or a hacker attack, but rather a problem with the cloud provider.

There is currently an intermittent connection error with our cloud provider which is affecting the user experience. Our dev team is resolving it with them. Funds are safe. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.?

— OKX (@okx) December 18, 2022

At the moment, neither spot trading nor other crypto tools are working. The situation with accounts is even worse — users do not have access to them and therefore cannot withdraw assets.

OKX is a fairly large exchange (especially in terms of futures), and when it starts working again, some accounts will receive margin calls — on small tokens and especially the native OKB token. Therefore, increased volatility is possible across the market, and investor losses will not improve the exchange’s reputation.

This will not be helped by the temporary interest of Elon Musk, who, having given up on Binance (the exchange gave him a loan to buy Twitter), signed up for OKX on Twitter, which raised many questions from the cryptocurrency community. However, at the time of writing, Musk’s interest has already waned and he has stopped following OKX.