Bitcoin Websites Experience Service Outage in Venezuela
A number of bitcoin websites experienced downtime today over a period of roughly four hours due to what appears to be a DNS server error at a major Internet service provider (ISP). Affected websites included local Latin American exchanges such as BlinkTrade, BitInka and SurBTC, as well as larger international startups such as Bitstamp, Blockchain, BTC-e and Coinbase. Other outlets such as Bitcoin.org and LocalBitcoins remained accessible during this time, and at press time, all websites said to have been affected were once again online. However, a video provided to CoinDesk by local....
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The Bank of Venezuela, one of the biggest state banks in the country, is now experiencing an outage that has left its customers without services for five days. The bank published a PR statement stating this was the result of a “terrorist attack” on the national financial system, being perpetrated in the form of a massive hack. More than 16 million customers are still without banking services at the time of writing.
Bank of Venezuela Hacked In “Terrorist Attack”
The Bank of Venezuela, one of the biggest financial institutions in the country, servicing....
Update: The source of the downtime seems to be an attack on a website (DolarToday) which was using CloudFlare. As a result, multiple sites, including bitcoin sites, were unavailable for hours earlier today. According to multiple complaints from Bitcoin users within Venezuela, the government of Venezuela has started blocking several known Bitcoin websites. The affected websites include Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin news sites, and also Bitcoin mining sites. The major ISP in Venezuela is CANTV, who has previously done similar censorship in the country. Like last time, the Venezuelan ISP has....
Bitfinex, while still listed on its website as being in the "beta-phase," is the largest USD based bitcoin exchange. Bitfinex is currently experiencing an outage, as they have acknowledged on twitter. Beyond tweets acknowledging the existence of an issue, Bitfinex has not yet released any information concerning the current service interruption. This latest outage follows an outage just four days ago on July 6th. Few details have been released about that outage, though it was addressed quickly. In late may of this year, Bitfinex' hot wallet was hacked to the tune of $5,400,000. No customer....
CANTV, Venezuela's state-owned and largest Internet service provider, has blocked, as of this morning, many Bitcoin-related domain names, websites and mining pools, according to Redditor rdymac. Among those confirmed to be blocked by the redditor are: coindesk.com; blockchain.info; blinktrade.com; surbitcoin.com; miningrigrentals.com; nicehash.com; btc-e.com; coinapult.com; coinbase.com. Venezuela's two local exchanges have also been blocked by CANTV, according to the redditor. The ISP is CANTV, managed by the institution CONATEL, and is very well known by their blockades to any website....
At the very least, a trio of UK-based electronic retail websites have been inundated with DDoS attacks by hackers holding the websites to ransom in exchange for Bitcoin. The websites have suffered temporary outage and have since put up a bounty to round up on the bitcoin-seeking attackers. Electronic retailers Aria Technology, Novatech and Scan Computers have all been targeted by hackers, resulting in the temporary disruption of services on their websites. Aria, in particular, announced that while the temporary outages were caused by persons unknown, the means used to cause the disruption....