Today’s BetaKit article about Newton
BetaKit published an article today about yesterday’s outage, which you can read here:
I think the article was fairly written, however we were not provided the opportunity to comment before it was published. I’d like to share my full comment here (Meagan also mentioned she plans to update the article based on my comment):
Hey Meagan,
Thanks for reaching out! Happy to comment, although I wish you had reached out sooner so we could provide more context.
From December 31 to April 28, we’ve grown from 35,000 to over 175,000 users, more than doubling the size of our team from 15 to 35 employees to keep up with demand. As you’d expect, it’s been a real challenge to hire fast enough to meet demand — we currently have 12 support reps and we’re planning to hire another 10 in short order. On busy days we receive thousands of inbound support tickets.
On a daily basis we handle anywhere from $5–20MM in trades, and we process millions of dollars in CAD payments and millions in crypto withdrawals. The vast majority of these are near-instant, a feature our customers appreciate.
To protect customers from account hijacking, however, we manually review withdrawals over a certain dollar value for signals that might look suspicious. We’re backlogged on these withdrawals right now and working on ways to move faster without compromising security. While I understand some customers may be frustrated, we have never had a major security incident or a significant loss of funds. Ever.
Regarding yesterday’s outage, we have actually fully restored withdrawals and most trading pairs and are processing trades and funding normally. These events are common in our industry — we rely on a number of vendors to make our platform work, and if any of them go down for maintenance it affects our ability to offer service. No customer funds were at risk, and we’re continuing to work on ways to improve the reliability and uptime of our platform.
tl;dr We’re scaling as fast as we can to meet insane demand growth, but right now we’re backlogged and working through support tickets as fast as we can. Support volumes explode whenever a vendor causes us to have downtime.
