Statement on Cardmarket Outage

Dear users,

Thank you for bearing with us the last couple of days. These were some difficult times for Cardmarket, but with some effort, we are now back online. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

We would like to give you some context on what exactly happened, what we are doing to fix it, and how we are moving forward.

What Happened?

Cardmarket has always been a company run by people passionate about trading cards. We consider ourselves a family of people that contribute to our platform out of love for what they do.

Since Cardmarket has experienced a lot of growth over the past few years, we have slowly added more features, while scaling up our infrastructure accordingly. In the past couple of months, we have seen an explosive surge in both new users and traffic that we were simply not able to keep up with – roughly a 600% increase. The new Pokémon hype combined with the growth of Magic: The Gathering and other games caused multiple bottlenecks in our infrastructure.

This is not only from single users performing single actions but also thousands of requests per second through our API.

When the site "crashed," Cardmarket had an astounding 86.000.000 card offers online, a number we could not have even dreamed of last year. And while we were working actively on the performance issues you have experienced in recent weeks, we could not keep pace with this growth.

Dealing with this last sudden outage was one of the most difficult times for us here at Cardmarket. We know our users rely on our platform's stability and performance, so we understand your frustration in this regard.

It did, however, also provide us with an opportunity to do some immediate fixes that were impossible to apply with the website running simultaneously, and because of these fixes, we are back.

What Have We Done?

We have rebuilt our server infrastructure from the ground up overnight. This new structure should no longer result in website downtime when the server load is past capacity. One slight downside of this new structure is that the writing speed is not as fast as before. In non-technical terms, you might sometimes experience a slight delay between an action and the response (for instance, putting an article in your shopping cart).

We have also suspended the following features until further notice:

• The API
• The Shopping Wizard
• Bulk Stock Management
• Linked Accounts

We understand that these are features that improve your experience on Cardmarket, and we are working tirelessly on bringing some of these features back to you. But at this point, we want you to do what Cardmarket is all about, buying and selling Trading Cards.

What Are We Doing?

As mentioned above, we are working hard on bringing important features like the Shopping Wizard back as soon as possible, so stay tuned for that.

For the API, we will be setting up a stricter policy on who will be allowed to use it, and how many requests can be fired in each instance. We are still planning on releasing API 3.0 later this year, which should also improve performance.

Features such as linked accounts are probably never coming back, but we are working on a new stock management interface that will make most of these features obsolete.

We hope this has informed you about what happened and what our plans are moving forward. One thing is certain – Cardmarket is not going anywhere. We are here to stay and that's thanks to a great community of users like yourself.

Thank you for understanding and bearing with us through these difficult few weeks.

Your Cardmarket Team