After peaking it’s top $265, bitcoin plunges down more than $100 on Wednesday afternoon. A lot of speculations are going around about how and what’s causing the crash. Earlier yesterday the reason being given for the sharp drop in price was a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Mtgox, the largest Bitcoin exchange. Some critics would say it’s a due correction and some say that bubble is about to burst and this is beginning.

Today Mtgox posted a statement on their facebook handle, saying they became victim of their own success.

Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night.
First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success!
Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!
To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys:
- The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs.
- The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.
Due to these facts we have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand. We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.
Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system.
Thank you for your understanding and continuous support!

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