Bitcoin Hit a One-Year Low as BitMEX Suffered Two DDoS Disruptions

Bitcoin fell to approximately $3,850 during overnight trading on March 13, 2020, its lowest level in almost a year, before rebounding above $5,000. At the same time, BitMEX—then a major center for leveraged bitcoin derivatives—suffered two disruptions that delayed or prevented customers’ requests from reaching the platform.

The combination turned an already historic selloff into a test of crypto’s market infrastructure. Bitcoin traded continuously while traditional markets were convulsed by uncertainty over the coronavirus pandemic, but continuous trading did not guarantee continuous access to every venue. Traders confronting rapid price changes also faced forced liquidations, impaired liquidity and, on BitMEX, periods when order requests could not be transmitted normally.

A second leg lower

Reuters reported at 08:56 UTC on March 13 that bitcoin had fallen more than 20% in overnight trading to around $3,850 before recovering to approximately $5,270. The report described that last observation as a 9% gain, illustrating how sharply the market had reversed after the low. These figures were contemporaneous spot-market observations, not an official closing price: bitcoin trades around the clock across venues, and values vary by exchange, currency pair and timestamp.

The March 13 decline followed an almost 40% loss reported for March 12. Treating the two dates separately matters. Much of the initial global risk-asset shock occurred on March 12, while the lowest quoted bitcoin prices and the exchange disruptions extended into March 13 UTC.

The speed of the movement also complicated claims that bitcoin was acting as a defensive asset during the first phase of the pandemic-driven market panic. The event did not settle bitcoin’s long-term monetary role, but it showed that, under an urgent demand for dollar liquidity, crypto could sell off alongside conventional risk assets.

BitMEX loses connectivity

In a notice issued on March 13, BitMEX said an “aggressive” distributed denial-of-service attack began at 12:56 UTC, delaying and preventing requests to the platform. The company said its security team restored full service within 25 minutes and confirmed that an earlier disruption had resulted from the same attack.

That statement established the service failure and BitMEX’s event-day explanation. It did not independently prove who conducted the attacks or quantify their effect on the wider bitcoin market.

A BitMEX postmortem published on March 16 identified the two attack times as 02:16 UTC and 12:56 UTC. According to the company, a specially constructed request targeting its Trollbox chat feature caused an inefficient database query plan and overwhelmed the platform’s authentication and API layers. BitMEX maintained that its trading engine continued operating, while messages from users were delayed before reaching it.

The distinction was consequential. A functioning matching engine offered limited protection to customers who could not reliably submit, modify or cancel orders during extreme volatility. It also raised questions about how leveraged positions and automated liquidations interacted with interruptions at a venue influential in bitcoin price discovery.

What could be established on March 13

The contemporaneous record supported three firm conclusions: bitcoin reached roughly $3,850 before rebounding; BitMEX experienced two periods of degraded access; and the failures occurred amid unusually severe volatility. It did not support a definitive claim that BitMEX caused the market bottom, deliberately suspended access or single-handedly reversed the selloff.

Those causal theories circulated because prices recovered around the first interruption, but timing alone could not separate the outage’s effect from changing liquidity, liquidations on other venues or buyers entering after the decline.

Later measurement

In July 2020, an ErisX presentation hosted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission used Coin Metrics and skew data to estimate that bitcoin fell from $7,300 at 09:00 UTC on March 12 to $3,900 at 06:00 UTC on March 13. That is a calculated decline of approximately 46.6% over the stated 21-hour window. The presentation also estimated $1.1 billion of BitMEX contract liquidations during that period.

Those later measurements help quantify the episode, but they were not available in finalized form on March 13 and should not be mistaken for a CFTC finding or a complete account of trading across every venue.