Coinbase seeds panic among users with erroneous 2FA change alerts

Coinbase, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange with approximately 68 million users from over 100 countries, has scared a significant amount of its users with erroneous 2FA warnings.

As the crypto exchange revealed over the weekend in a Twitter thread, it accidentally alerted roughly 125,000 customers that their 2FA settings had have been changed on August 28, between 1:45 pm PST and 3:07 pm PST.

In a Friday incident report, Coinbase explained that the notifications were sent in error and that customers are not required to take any action to restore their 2FA settings.

"We are aware a large number of customers have received notifications (email/SMS) that 2FA settings were changed. This appears to have been sent in error. We are still investigating why this message was sent, but no action is required at this time," Coinbase said.

"We’ve verified no security settings were changed unintentionally, and the notifications were sent in error. Full functionality is restored, and we’re continuing to monitor to be safe."

Coinbase notification services issue behind scary 2FA alerts

While the crypto exchange did not share why the erroneous alerts were sent with its customers, Coinbase did say that it wasn't a malicious actor or an intern and pointed at "an issue with our notification services that unfortunately caused some real concern for our customers."

The incident revealed a support problem Coinbase still has to deal with, given that dozen of customers have replied to the Twitter thread complaining that their accounts are still locked or disabled after months of attempting to get in touch with the exchange's support team.

Coinbase's 2FA notification problems come after a recent CNBC report highlighting what thousands of users described as "terrible customer service" after hackers drained their accounts.

In January, Coinbase's Customer Experience VP Casper Sorensen acknowledged the support issues and committed to "a better customer experience" with the increase of the exchange's 24/7 customer support team, as well as the addition of self-service options and a real-time Coinbase Support chat.

In March, he added that Coinbase is working on reducing the number of accounts blocked by the platform's suspicious activity false positives.

He also reported in July a 5x increase in support staff since January and the rollout of a virtual assistant, live chat via messaging, and live phone support in the coming months.