Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, extends maintenance after massive bitcoin sell-off

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Gemini, the crypto exchange, extended a scheduled maintenance after a bitcoin sell-off.
The exchange appeared to be down for some users for much of the morning.
Bitcoin, the red-hot cryptocurrency, shed more than $1,500 during the downtime.
The exchange will provide data for Cboe Global Markets' bitcoin futures contracts, which will go live Sunday.

Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by the famous Winklevoss twins, has extended a scheduled maintenance of its site after a massive bitcoin sell-off.

The company said Friday night that its site would undergo maintenance from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. ET Saturday, adding that users shouldn't expect "downtime." Still, the site appeared to be down for some users during the period, preventing folks from accessing their cryptocurrency accounts.

At around 1:00 p.m. ET the company said the maintenance would continue:

The outage coincided with a massive bitcoin sell-off, which shaved more than $1,500 of its price, according to Markets Insider data. By 1:22 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading down 11% against the US dollar at $14,305 a coin. The outage infuriated some users who were unable to move their coins around as bitcoin's price slid. One person criticized the firm for not giving users enough notice on the original maintenance:

Here's another discontent tweeter:

Founded in 2015 by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who reportedly own a billion dollars of bitcoin, Gemini is one of the best-connected firms in the cryptocurrency space. Cboe Global Markets is partnering with the exchange for its bitcoin futures contracts, which are set to go live Sunday.

When volumes have increased on Gemini, the firm has faced challenges staying online.

Earlier this month, the firm showed many users a "504 Gateway Time-out" message, which meant its servers were not responding to requests. The company posted on its status page that "systems are currently experiencing degraded performance."

The exchange also experienced outages lasting as long as 10 hours in August, according to reporting by Quartz.

“This is not the first scaling challenge we’ve encountered, and it won’t be the last,” Gemini said in a blog post. “We’re continuing to improve our performance and infrastructure monitoring so we can anticipate potential problems more quickly in the future.”

Gemini did not respond to a request for comment.