Polymarket halts trading in major API outage, then sees second degradation
Polymarket paused trading on August 22, 2026, at 1:13 PM due to a major outage affecting its Trading API (CLOB). The incident was identified nine minutes later, at 1:22 PM, and flagged as a major outage on the platform's status page. On August 24, Polymarket reported partially degraded performance on its perpetuals trading product, an incident that had started roughly 14 hours before the update. Both disruptions originated from the same status-monitoring source.
Trading halts on a CFTC-regulated exchange carry immediate financial consequences: bots and market makers that rely on continuous price discovery face forced position exits and broken strategies when the API drops. The August 22 outage lasted until resolution, while the August 24 perpetuals degradation ran for 14 hours before acknowledgment — a gap that suggests monitoring or escalation gaps inside Polymarket's operations team.
Traders who lever up on perpetuals assume 24/7 access; two infrastructure failures in 48 hours erode that assumption fast. Rival platforms like Kalshi and Novig will cite uptime in competitive sales pitches. Polymarket must now invest in redundant API paths or risk losing the algorithmic trading volume that its 26-second oracle gap already put under scrutiny.
Polymarket's infrastructure reliability faces scrutiny after a Bitquery report flagged a 26-second oracle gap that could enable front-running, and now a second major system failure in two days has halted trading entirely.