Post mortem on the outage of last Sunday

On Sunday 21 September 2025, an issue at the main Bitonic datacentre caused our website and app to be unavailable. Because of this we were unable to serve our customers during most of the day. This was a major disruption and although no funds were ever at risk, we realise that this situation has had a big impact on our customers.

First of all, I would like to express my sincerest apologies for the inconvenience and distress this disruption has caused.

The disruption first started at 6:35 in the morning of 21 September 2025 and full service was restored for all customers on 21 September around 20:00 CEST. Throughout the incident, Bitonic's security systems continued to work as expected. During the period in which customers were unable to access our services, any trading and withdrawing was also halted.

Cause and mitigations

The cause of the outage was the complete failure of one of our storage platform nodes (a server at our datacentre). The storage platform serves most of our services. Although our systems are designed to withstand an outage like this, this ultimately led to the platform being unavailable to the services.

The data stored on the storage platform is fully distributed and redundantly stored. It prevents any data loss even in the event of a node failing catastrophically. The system is designed to allow for this kind of failure without problem.

Even though the system worked as intended and was recovering, the recovery put additional strain on the storage system which led to it reaching a safety limit and disallowing any new operations. This limit caused most of our services to become unavailable.

Immediately after the issue presented itself, our engineers were dispatched to investigate both remotely and on location in our datacentre. The recovery process unfortunately took a lot of time to fully complete in order to resume full operations.

Lessons and prevention

We at Bitonic pride ourselves on offering services where no third party ever has or can gain control over your data. We always design our products around the highest standards of privacy and security. This means we manage our own datacentres and employ our own highly skilled engineering staff to maintain these services.

However, even though we have proven over the last 13 years to be more than capable of providing these services, we aspire to a higher level of stability and availability in order to ensure customer satisfaction. To support this ambition we already made the decision more than a year ago to migrate our fully self-managed datacentres to partially managed ones. This allows us to still maintain full control of all software and data, while at the same time falling back on a dedicated professional third-party to manage our hardware needs; this includes the storage platform at the core of this incident.

The migration is in process and well underway, we expect it to be finished by the end of this year.

Furthermore we are working on raising our storage capacity to be well within the safety limits and have increased monitoring on the platform as a whole, both in the current and future situations.

In conclusion

As stated earlier, I am sorry for this incident and the distress caused to our customers for not being able to have full access to your funds.

The systems and procedures we have in place are able to withstand these types of problems and we will continue to make sure your data and funds will never be unnecessarily at risk. We will make sure a disruption this long will not reoccur and the team will focus its full attention on improving our systems to prevent anything like this incident in the future.

Finally, I want to thank our excellent engineering team and our loyal customers for their continued support.

Niels van Groningen,
CEO Bitonic B.V.