This blaze is on fire.

The recent, unexpected explosion in demand has been overwhelming.  Each of the past few days has produced 50,000 new account registrations and 10,000 new support tickets — an order of magnitude above where we were just last quarter.  Concurrent users, daily trades and volumes are also hitting new all-time highs.  We are struggling to keep up.

Kraken.com performance is extremely degraded and unreliable.  Clients can expect severe latency and difficulty interacting with all web and API services.  Requests will frequently timeout and fail.  At the moment, the only solution is to wait and try again later.

Next week we will be rolling out a major systems upgrade which should resolve these scaling and load issues.  The upgrade is long overdue and has been substantially delayed by the diversion of resources toward the protracted fire fighting effort required to deal with the last several months of unrelenting growth.

Our fiat funding partners are also experiencing strain.  Most were not prepared for the massive spike in transfer processing and current delays are outside of the usual range, especially for domestic USD.  Cryptocurrency funding remains unaffected.

If you are looking for phone support, be aware that Kraken does NOT offer phone support at this time.  There have been several reports of phishing attempts through fraudulent Kraken support phone numbers advertised on the Internet.  Kraken will never ask you for your password, and we will never ask you to install any software.  Remember that if you are publicly advertising your involvement with cryptocurrencies, you are making yourself a target.  

We regret that we cannot at this time offer what we feel is an acceptable quality of service to our clients.  We hope to make it up to you in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, please trade with caution.  The markets are highly volatile and you are likely to have trouble managing your orders.

Sincerest apologies,

The Kraken Team

UPDATE – 23/Dec/2017: https://blog.kraken.com/post/1413/update-on-system-performance-and-upgrade/