I highly doubt it's incompetence - they're trying to perhaps single-handedly prevent a crash by everyone rushing to sell at once, to block people's impulse decision to sell for long enough to help further subside a crash. Coinbase's behaviour is highly suspect and perhaps should warrant investigation into purposeful manipulation - whether there are laws that currently exist that would cover this case or not doesn't mean there shouldn't be.
Robinhood and TD Ameritrade both do the same thing when the stock market tanks. Considering these companies are supposed to be making profit from their services rather than interest on appreciation the assets their customers trade on their platforms, I'd think the more likely culprit is external DoS attacks from entities with large stakes, rather than the companies themselves.
I doubt it's anything nefarious. Competence is certainly a huge factor, but it isn't everything. It's crazy how much market activity spikes when the stock market tanks. And, unlike holiday retail rushes, it's very difficult to anticipate and plan for such days. (If anyone knows how, they're way too busy getting filthy rich to bother with telling anybody else how to do it.) So you're invariably caught off guard.
Source: Worked at a firm that never actually went down under the load, but got plenty of cardio in helping to make sure it didn't.
My billion dollar Canadian health/benefits insurance company turns their login form (and therefore form submission) website off at five oclock every day and entirely on holidays.
No joke. I'd like to meet Manulife's web site developers, hold their heads with my hands, shake them vigorously and ask 'how could you make a website in 2021 (2011/12/13/14..../20) that needs to go down everyday for maintenance?!'
I didn’t want to say the name for some reason but you nailed it.
It’s really amazing isn’t it? I share your sentiment entirely. It takes some chutzpah to do something like that in 2021. And as a developer I can only laugh at being inconvenienced in such a way.
Twitter would go down all the time for years (remember the Fail Whale?)
With Coinbase, don't forget that a/ they're dealing with huge spikes of people trying to do actions (not just reading) that happens once every 2-3 years and b/ they're built on a network and aren't able to control everything.
I'm not saying they should be going down, but I don't think I'd write it off as negligence.
