Bitcoin soars more than $3,000 in under 3 hours on Coinbase -and the site went down

Coinbase

• Bitcoin soared from $16,000 a coin on Coinbase's GDAX exchange to $19,500 in less than three hours Thursday.
• Coinbase site appears to be down for some users.
• Bitcoin was trading at $15,398 a coin at 11:59 a.m. ET, according to Markets Insider data.

Bitcoin soared above $19,500 a coin on Coinbase's GDAX exchange around 11 a.m. ET Thursday, just three hours after it blew past $16,000 on the site.

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The massive tear upwards seems to have put pressure on Coinbase. The exchange's site was down at the time of print. The company said on twitter at 8:07 a.m. PT that users were experiencing issues logging in because of record traffic. Here's the tweet:

Coinbase

The company, which is the largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies in the US, has experienced a number of outages as the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed to new highs. The cryptocurrency exchange was down last Friday for about an hour, two days after a major system outage kept many users from accessing their bitcoin wallets.

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