Hacker News Reader

Comment by crayboff | Hacker News Reader

Tbf getting all of the engineers and leadership online to figure out what is going on, write and authorize a public statement is a pretty quick turnaround

View on HN

Don't use coinbase, but this seems like the sort of thing they'd stick a warning about in a flash message on the account page itself. "We've recieved reports of our page incorrectly reporting account balances. Please standby for more info..." Maybe there's some useful procedure in place preventing them from doing that quickly? Seems like something most sites with authentication would have? I usually build it into my front-ends... it doesn't have to look good (if you're running a reliable site, anyway,) it just has to be visible.

They did exactly this. I see $0 balance and big red banner on top with the same message as on the status page.

EDIT: looks like a scaling issue. Refreshed the page and balance reappeared. Refreshed again and it is gone, but the chart below with the balance history still has correct data.

Ah, ok that makes more sense, especially because this would almost certainly trigger a whole lot of people logging in on every device they have to make sure it wasn't a device artifact, and maybe the APIs/systems were both affected by the same problem. My gut says an investment platform should have a more fault resistant messaging system, but I can't think of a reasonable fundamental security or stability threat they'd face without one, so maybe that money was better spent in other areas.

Edit: Entirely theoretical, but I wonder if there's a bank-run sort of threat for a financial institution getting communication about a system like this wrong enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com