from Hacker News

Kraken Goes Down for 40 Hours, Drawing Mt. Gox Comparisons

by yonilevy on 1/13/18, 2:56 AM with 33 comments

  • by hal9000xp on 1/13/18, 8:31 AM

    Latest Kraken update says that:

    > We are still working to track down an elusive bug which is holding up launch. This bug did not appear in our many weeks of testing and only emerged in the production environment. Unfortunately, it is not consistently reproducible and we cannot launch until this issue is resolved.

    Sounds pretty realistic to me. During my 8+ years of programming, I had a lot of pain and sleepless nights trying to catch elusive bugs which can be reproduced only in production servers and only sometimes. Many times, my clueless managers got nervous and demanded estimated time from me. Unfortunately, it's impossible to give realistic estimations. It could take hours, days or weeks. Also, searching for such bugs doesn't scale well. It means if you have 5 devs looking for elusive bug, it doesn't mean they will find a bug 5 times faster.

  • by valdiorn on 1/13/18, 10:45 PM

    Upgrade a 750 million dollar a day trading system with no rollback strategy.

    Amateur hour, and if this were a "real" exchange, they'd lose their licence and have lawsuits and government agents knocking down their door (real-money MTFs have strict uptime and infrastructure requirements for anyone who didn't know)

  • by hrpnk on 1/13/18, 11:48 AM

    They're back with free trading until end of January: https://blog.kraken.com/post/1449/kraken-returns-with-free-t...

  • by lowlevel on 1/14/18, 3:40 AM

    They say the next big thing is here, that the revolution's near, but to me it seems quite clear that it's all just a little bit of history repeating

  • by hndamien on 1/16/18, 4:59 AM

    I tend to trust them for security because they are handling the Gox bankruptcy. For uptime... not so much.

  • by rootsudo on 1/14/18, 10:20 PM

    IT sounds like this week is going to be profitable on Kraken if you trust their status reports.

  • by arisAlexis on 1/13/18, 11:56 PM

    everything is up and trading is free for the rest of the month. </drama>

  • by verroq on 1/13/18, 6:49 AM

    Pretty irresponsible to completely brick production servers when doing an upgrade.

    https://status.kraken.com

    Sounds like their staff has being going without sleep for a few days now.

  • by azzhohle on 1/13/18, 8:03 PM

    Kraken is notoriously slow, unresponsive and buggy exchange and frankly I dont know why they get away with it. For months or year(s) you often run into site unavailable errors (load balancing issues?). Or if you are lucky to get to the trading screen you are unable to get trades through because of engine issues (capacity issues again?). Sometimes all you see is an empty red background rectangle where the error text should be indicating no dice but then minutes/hours later you might get one or more of the positions you tried to open despite only having gotten (ambiguous) errors.

    Let's hope they finally fixed their engine and purchased more capacity.