Coinbase suffers outages amid bitcoin surge

Coinbase said on Thursday it suffered outages this week as the bitcoin exchange saw "unprecedented traffic and trading," with the digital currency hitting record levels.

Bitcoin fell as much as 6.5 percent to $2,263.72 at around 1730 GMT on Thursday, but rebounded shortly after to hit a fresh all-time high of $2,760.10. Bitcoin hit a record on the BitStamp platform on Wednesday, driven by an uptick in demand for crypto-assets, with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin.

So far this year, the price of bitcoin has more than doubled.

Coinbase, the world's largest bitcoin company with operations in 32 countries, said the heavy traffic had caused outages at its website as well. The exchange said it was working to resolve the issues.

Problems that Coinbase's platform experienced earlier this week, including card verification failures and slow load times, were resolved, its status page showed.