[joshuahedlund]

> Shouldn't an exchange be able to handle volume? Seems like a basic requirement.

Exchanges have incentive to handle as much volume as possible to make as much via fees as possible, but no site can handle infinite volume. The coinbase app has been climbing the iTunes charts into the top 20 the last couple days. Just before the site went down the price was running up by hundreds of dollars per minute, attracting tons of trader traffic trying to profit from it. Even if they have basic scaling measures in place for the basic infrastructure, they most likely experienced unprecedented exponentially increasing volume that was inevitably bound to break something