FTX Restricts Users to ‘Post Only’ as Cloudflare Faces Outage

Major crypto exchanges are down and inaccessible to some users due to server-side problems Cloudflare is experiencing. FTX and Bitmex are part of the affected exchanges. FTX consequently restricted its users to post-only mode.

Cloudflare is experiencing an outage, and so FTX and many other sites are going to be hard to access for many users. FTX markets are in post-only mode.

— FTX (@FTX_Official) June 21, 2022

Post-only mode means that traders can only place an order if it would go to the order book as a maker order. Otherwise, the order declines. The implication is that users will have no access to other order types such as stop-loss, take profit, and trailing stop.

Twitter user @haxpor argued that “it doesn’t make sense” for FTX to take such limiting action. His words:

RIP stop-loss. It doesn’t make sense much to prevent access to a market order, but still, another is possible. Maybe the exchange tries to slow down trades across the board, buying time to do something.

Bitmex, on the other hand, didn’t make any trade restrictions on its users. They only said some users might be unable to access the website and API, though funds remain safe.

Cloudflare, Inc. is a content delivery network and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation company. A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the regular traffic of a server by overwhelming its infrastructure with superfluous requests. It is similar to a group of people crowding the entry door of a store, preventing legitimate customers from shopping.

On April 27, 2022, Cloudflare reported that they detected and foiled a 15.3 million request per second DDoS attack on a crypto launchpad. The attack represents one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record.