Elon Musk becomes the richest person, Bitcoin briefly surpasses $40,000, exchanges experience downtime with delays on Coinbase and Binance.

Early on the 8th, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk became the world's richest person, Bitcoin quickly surged past $40,000. The heated cryptocurrency market also caused a rare occurrence of network connection issues on Coinbase, while the exchange Binance experienced system delays.

Elon Musk Becomes the Richest Person as Bitcoin Surpasses $40,000

Due to the soaring stock price of Tesla, the founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, has reached a net worth of $195 billion, surpassing the previous world's richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Upon learning that he had become the richest person, Elon Musk had a modest reaction, stating, "Well, back to work I go."

A few hours later, in the early hours of the 8th, Bitcoin quickly surged to over $40,000, hitting a new high again, achieving a more than 20% increase in just four days since Monday.

Coinbase Experiences Rare Outage, Indicating Market Fervor

During this rapid surge past $40,000, the exchange Coinbase issued a rare "outage notice." The announcement stated that Coinbase and Coinbase Pro experienced connection issues, which have since been resolved after nearly six hours of maintenance.

We're aware of and investigating connectivity issues on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro on both web and mobile apps. We're working quickly to restore service back to normal, and we'll send an update as soon as this issue is resolved. https://t.co/pRx2MtUsHe

— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) January 7, 2021

Binance, the Largest Cryptocurrency Exchange, Faces Repeated Outages

Whenever Binance reaches new highs recently, outages seem to follow. During the surge past $40,000 in the early hours of the 8th, some services experienced problems. The official explanation cited the historic trading volume causing some system delays, but the issues were quickly resolved.

Over the past month, during significant price corrections on January 4th, the substantial price correction on December 21st, and the breakthrough of $20,000 on December 16th, similar issues occurred. This demonstrates that managing the increased user traffic on Binance due to the significant price increases remains a significant challenge.