Crypto exchange Binance halts withdrawals for two hours due to a database glitch

• Binance temporarily suspended all crypto withdrawals on Monday morning.
• The world's biggest crypto exchange said a database issue had impacted the withdrawal service.

Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world, halted withdrawals for just under two hours on Monday due to a glitch in its database system.

The company said it had temporarily disabled all crypto withdrawals in a tweet posted at around 7.35 a.m. ET on Monday.

It then claimed to have restarted withdrawals, only to quickly say they were disabled again.

But at around 9.50 a.m. Binance said it had resumed processing and apologized to users for any inconvenience.

"Today's temporary pause on withdrawing funds was due to a database system issue that impacted our withdrawal service," a Binance spokesperson told Insider.

"The team was able to fix the failure and verify that all data and dependencies were working normally before we restarted withdrawals. At no times were users' funds at risk. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."

Read more: Beware of 'The Flippening': 7 crypto experts break down the ominous-sounding event and its implications for bitcoin, with some investors fearing it could unsettle the crypto market

Binance is the biggest crypto trading platform in the world by daily trading volume, meaning any disruptions to the platform could have potentially serious consequences for the broader market.

The exchange has suffered outages in the past, most often at times of high price volatility. A major outage in May led to steep losses for some users, who were unable to dump their coins during a sell-off.

Analysts have long warned that investors have very little protection in crypto markets, which are largely unregulated, if the technology goes wrong.

Gary Gensler, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has said crypto trading platforms should be more closely regulated as 95% of the activity in the market takes place on them.

Other crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and general trading platforms such as Robinhood have also suffered outages this year when trading activity has spiked, often causing anger among their millions of users.

Cryptocurrency markets were relatively calm on Monday, however. Bitcoin was up around 0.7% to $61,128 as of midday Monday.