Binance Shares Post Mortem of Temporary BTC Network Withdrawal Suspension 

Key Takeaways: 

• Bitcoin withdrawals were on pause for three hours on the Binance network.
• The Binance team informed that withdrawals were available on other networks. 

On Monday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange paused Bitcoin withdrawals as there were some issues with “stuck on-chain transactions.” Initially, CEO Changpeng Zao, said that the situation would get better within 30 minutes, but later the funds of the users were ” SAFU,” but it would take more than the initial estimated time. 

Temporary pause of $BTC withdrawals on #Binance due to a stuck transaction causing a backlog. Should be fixed in ~30 minutes. Will update.

Funds are SAFU.

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) June 13, 2022

On June 13, the exchange shared a post-mortem of the temporary 3 hours pause, which affected the Bitcoin withdrawals on the network only. The team explained that they were fixing “several minor hardware failures” on the consolidation nodes of the wallet. All the previous transactions that were stuck were broadcasted after the problem was fixed. 

Post mortem of our temporary BTC network withdrawal suspension.

🔸 Temporary pause duration: ~3 hours
🔸 Impact: $BTC network withdrawals only. Users could still withdraw #Bitcoin on other networks without delay (ERC20 & BEP20). Deposits unaffected.

🧵More details 👇

— Binance (@binance) June 13, 2022

To make things easier for users to understand, the team explained that the consolidation transactions that were pending had a low gas fee. This affected the withdrawal of transactions, and therefore, the consolidation UTXO got stuck for hours. 

Before announcing that the network withdrawals were back online, Binance further explained that they changed the logic to only accept UTXO from consolidation transactions and ensured that this issue never happens again.