Leading cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e announced on early Thursday morning (around 5:30 am EST) that it was under Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, CoinTelegraph reported.

The website went offline after the attack and displayed a white page saying “DB connect error”.

The DDoS attack tries to make an online service unavailable by flooding it with traffic from multiple sources. BTC-e soon resolved the issues and was back online within a few hours.
 

Earlier in January, BTC-e suffered another DDoS attack with its website offline for several hours, CoinTelegraph reported. The startup has been facing such attacks for almost two years now. In February 2014, it also suffered a DDoS attack.

In addition, data breach monitoring service LeakedSource in September revealed that BTC-E.com suffered major hack in 2014. It said that over 500,000 users of BTC-E.com were hacked in October 2014. The data contained usernames, emails, passwords, ip addresses, register dates, languages and some internal data such as how many coins the user had.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is frequently facing DDoS attacks. In June 2016, BitGo Inc., a leading multi-sig bitcoin wallet provider, announced that it was under Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Another bitcoin startup Coinkite Inc. decided to close its secure wallet service this year due to never ending DDoS attacks.