Poloniex Freeze causes Monero (BTC/XMR) and Ethereum (BTC/ETH) to drop significantly, massive order delays

Today, Friday 17th of March 2017 we could witness severe order delays and freezes of the poloniex site, including the trading API. The image below shows an output of the XMR/BTC trading pair as displayed on cryptowat.ch, which represents the mess which traders had (and still have) to face today. Insiders are blaming the bots as well as a very high order volume for the issues, but the question remains why poloniex has not implemented a better scaling solution for their services.

The massive delays in the orders caused extreme spikes, especially for the XMR/BTC (Monero to Bitcoin) pair, which dropped from 0.02349496 to 0.01550000 at 2017-03-17 between 8:25 and 8:30 UTC. Following the dump, the prices were with massive delays cycling between 0.0175 and 0.0195. Currently the trading seems to be still very laggy, with a lot of orders not processing.

Similar issues have been reported at the ETH/BTC pair, with especially margin trading not being functional. ETH had a high of 0.04740000 BTC at 2017-03-17 07:15 UTC and 0.03131300 BTC low at 08:45 UTC.

Currently the markets seem to be recovering (at least for a small bit), the administrators of poloniex are reportedly "aware and working on the issues". Still there is no official statement from poloniex.

At the same time, Bitcoin/USDT is falling, which is also part of the instability problem at poloniex: 24h high was 1219.10 USDT yesterday (2017-03-16 18:30 UTC) and 24h low was 1052.00 USDT (2017-03-17 08:00 UTC).