FTX.com was temporarily down, while the websites of Alameda Research and FTX Ventures were made private.
FTX, a Bahamian cryptocurrency exchange established in 2019, reportedly shut down its website for a few hours on November 9th.
According to the data available on the “IS IT DOWN OR JUST ME” website, on November 9th, customers reported five outages in a span of two hours. It is worth noting that by 9 p.m. UTC on November 9th, the website was back and running, with additional warnings issued on various pages.
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Throughout the whole FTX website, customers are greeted by a red banner stating:
FTX is currently unable to process withdrawals. We strongly advise against depositing.
One of FTX’s staff members used the official FTX Telegram Group to share more in-depth information about the situation regarding FTX’s services. The member noted that crypto withdrawals are currently halted without any estimated date when it may be available.
We are waiting for confirmation from our team to ramp it up. Right now we don't have an ETA but surely will communicate it as soon as we have it.
Some reports highlighted that all attempts to register on the platform were unsuccessful. The website contained a message informing that signups are temporarily paused. At the time of writing, a message under the red banner says: “all onboarding of new clients has been suspended until further notice.”
While FTX.com was down temporarily, other FTX-related websites were shut down completely. On November 9th, Alameda Research and FTX venture capital branch, dubbed FTX Ventures websites, were made private.
FTX’s saga began unrolling on November 6th, when crypto exchange Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao used Twitter to announce that his company aims to liquidate all of its FTX native token, FTT, holdings. At that time, Zhao claimed that the decision was made due to “recent revelations that have come to light.”
The “revelations” that Zhao is talking about could be associated with recently leaked FTX CEO’s Alameda Research balance sheets. The documents allegedly revealed that Alameda Research holds around $5.8 billion worth of FTT tokens, approximately $2.16 billion in “FTT collateral,” and $3.66 billion in “unlocked FTT.”
To the surprise of many, on November 8th, Binance announced its plans to acquire FTX. However, just over a day later, Binance pulled away from the deal, claiming that FTX’s issues were beyond the company’s “control or ability to help.”
