Confirmed: BitPay Experienced 3-Hour Bitcoin Payment Outage

Published at: Dec. 23, 2019

Major cryptocurrency payment service provider BitPay has confirmed that its service had a temporary outage of Bitcoin (BTC) payments on Dec. 22.

Bitcoin payments were briefly unavailable for almost 3.5 hours on BitPay as the company was working to fix transaction issues, BitPay Support tweeted Dec. 22. According to the information, the service was restored by 4:25 PM EST.

In an email to Cointelegraph, BitPay did not provide additional details about the possible cause of the outage, stating:

“There were temporary issues with BitPay’s BTC payment processing system. Our tech team was alerted and promptly resolved the issue.”

Multiple users complained about the issue

Prior to the BitPay’s official notice on BTC payment issues, a number of users have reported that the service was unavailable. Some Bitpay users on Twitter suggested that the platform has disabled Bitcoin payments for all merchants, noting that the service wasn’t available at several stores.

Another user on Twitter pointed out BitPay’s capacity to transfer API data as a major benefit of the service, while criticizing the outage:

“I love your API data service but you guys gotta fix your shit. Dump bitpay and install btcpayserver, it's embarrassing that a service called ‘bitcoinaverage’ can't even accept Bitcoin for payment.”

The news comes after BitPay rolled out support for three new stablecoins: USD Coin (USDC), Gemini Dollar (GUSD) and Paxos Standard Token (PAX) on Dec. 10. As reported, the new listings brought the total number of BitPay-supported cryptocurrencies to six, alongside Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ether (ETH).

Growing controversy over BitPay

As of December 2019, over 30,000 global merchants were reportedly using BitPay service, according to the firm. Despite a massive bear market on crypto markets in 2018, BitPay reportedly saw some growth during that year, with the company reporting $1 billion in transactions in 2018.

Founded in 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia, BitPay has been often referred to as “controversial” though. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, BitPay had quite the dubious reputation in recent years as it was involved in promoting Bitcoin Cash as a more attractive option to Bitcoin itself, alongside support and technical issues which reportedly resulted in the loss of several significant clients.

Disclaimer: This article was updated to specify a quote from BitPay team in regard to recent Bitcoin payment processing system issues.

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