Leading cryptocurrency exchange faces outages as bitcoin rivals surge

This month's cryptocurrency boom isn't limited to bitcoin. Over the last 24 hours, two of bitcoin's biggest rivals—Litecoin and Ethereum's ether—have enjoyed huge price gains.

Trading volume has been so intense that one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange services, Coinbase, has suffered downtime.

"Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled," read a notice on the Coinbase status page around 2pm Eastern time. That issue was resolved around 45 minutes later, while trading in litecoins was disabled for about 90 minutes earlier in the day. The status page lists both ether and litecoin trading as having a "Major Outage." Bitcoin's price has also been doing well over the last 24 hours—but those gains were largely regaining ground lost over the weekend. Bitcoin recently passed $17,000, roughly the same value the currency reached last Thursday.