The official blog of GDAX, Coinbase's cryptocurrency exchange, with trading updates and notices on forks like Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2x.
HN links it in discussions of the ETH flash crash, margin calls, circuit breakers, and whether GDAX would support Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold.
It wasn't a glitch - the system was functioning exactly as designed. Yes, GDAX should have had a circuit breaker implemented (and I expect they'll do so shortly), but lots of people were foolishly doing margin trading.
This story happened more than a week ago, and GDAX has since (at great cost) decided to refund all those who lost money due to margin calls or stop loss orders: https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-2-216a3b946ef6
Hopefully this will serve as an important lesson on the risks of margin trading, and encourage all exchanges to implement circuit breakers.
I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently (https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1), if Coinbase / GDAX instituted some sort of "circuit breakers" on their exchange to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Bitcoin and the other cryptos, trades at a pretty low volume relative to their market cap, so if a lot of people we're trying to dump large orders this morning to take a profit at the new ATH, I could see that causing similar issues that they may have been trying to prevent.
Closest they've come that I'm aware of is this -
"...we do not believe it is safe to allow support for Bitcoin Gold at this time. If the blockchain proves to be secure and valuable, GDAX may choose to support it and at that point credit your account with an amount of Bitcoin Gold equal to your Bitcoin (BTC) balance at the time of the fork."
https://blog.gdax.com/timeline-and-support-bitcoin-segwit2x-and-bitcoin-gold-83778344949d
I believe there were multiple posts explaining what happened.
Coinbase is also crediting back the affected users https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-2-216a3b946ef6
@jchw:
actually gdax just announce they would support BCC
https://blog.gdax.com/update-on-bitcoin-cash-396d7249420b
Looks like GDAX for one is not participating in case of a hard fork: https://blog.gdax.com/uahf-a703b6a13115