Bitfinex briefly halts trading after cyber attack

Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency trading platform owned by iFinex Inc briefly halted all its operations on Tuesday morning following a cyber-attack on the trading platform.

The Bitfinex website and the company’s Twitter handle stated: “The previous outage was caused by issues with one of our infrastructure providers."

During this brief period, Bitcoin prices fell 2 percent following the cyber-attack news, hitting a low of $7,373.47, according to data from CoinDesk.

Bitfinex was aimed in what is known as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack), which basically floods a system with multiple virus infected servers.

When trading resumed after two hours of the cyber attack, the company website said, “They were monitoring the situation closely,” and trading had to be stopped as it went under “unplanned maintenance.”

"The attack only impacted trading operations, and user accounts and their associated funds/account balances were not at risk at any point during the attack," said a Bitfinex spokesperson.

In August 2016, Bitfinex had to stop operations and suspend trading in after a hack resulted in the theft of nearly 1,20,000 bitcoins.

Japanese exchange Coincheck was the victim of a similar incident where hackers stole $500 million worth of cryptocurrency.