Bitcoin soars more than $3,000 in under 3 hours on Coinbase — then the site went down

Bitcoin soared from $16,000 a coin on Coinbase's GDAX exchange to more than $19,500 in less than three hours Thursday.
Coinbase said its site was down for some users because of record-high traffic.
Bitcoin was trading at $15,398 a coin at 11:59 a.m. ET, according to Markets Insider data.

Bitcoin soared above $19,500 a coin on Coinbase's GDAX exchange around 11 a.m. ET Thursday, just three hours after it blew past $16,000 on the exchange.

The massive tear upwards seems to have put pressure on Coinbase. The exchange's site was down just before the time of print. The company said on twitter at 8:07 a.m. PT that users were experiencing issues logging into their accounts because of record traffic.

The company, which is the largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies in the US, has experienced a number of outages as the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed to new highs. The cryptocurrency exchange was down last Friday for about an hour, two days after a major system outage kept many users from accessing their bitcoin wallets.

Cryptocurrency exchanges, which don't have the industrial infrastructure of traditional exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, are under pressure to handle record trading volumes.

24-hour trading volumes reached a record high above $28 billion on Thursday, according to crypto data site CoinMarketCap. To put that in context, that is more than half of the $50 billion worth of securities that trade on the New York Stock Exchange during an average trading session.