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From the Bitfinex.com homepage:
Investigating - Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex.
We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.
The theft is being reported to—and we are co-operating with—law enforcement.
As we account for individualized customer losses, we may need to settle open margin positions, associated financing, and/or collateral affected by the breach. Any settlements will be at the current market prices as of 18:00 UTC. We are taking this necessary accounting step to normalize account balances with the objective of resuming operations. We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation. While we are halting all operations at this time, we can confirm that the breach was limited to bitcoin wallets; the other digital tokens traded on Bitfinex are unaffected.
The amount was posted in a reddit thread here: I can confirm that the loss from the hack stands at 119,756btc.
According to coindesk.com:
The price of bitcoin fell sharply today exacerbating an already ongoing decline as global market participants reacted to news that one of the largest digital currency exchanges had been hacked.
Earlier this afternoon, Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex halted trading after discovering a security breach, which included taking its website offline and pausing all withdrawals and deposits. Representatives from the exchange told CoinDesk engineers were seeking to uncover issues at press time, though the company had confirmed roughly 120,000 BTC (more than $60m) was lost or stolenvia social media.
In response, bitcoin prices fell to $560.16 by 19:30 UTC, $530 by 23:30 and $480 at press time, CoinDesk USD Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) data reveals.
This price was roughly 20% lower than the day's opening of $607.37 and 27% below the high of $658.28 reached on Saturday, 30th July, when the digital currency began pushing lower.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pendorbound on Wednesday August 03 2016, @02:13PM
Um, no. That's not how this works. You have had some BTC stolen. They're *your* BTC because your users loaned them to you, but you're still on the hook to return to your users the valuable fungible goods which they lent you.
Of course, the user agreement may say otherwise. Always read the fine print... Either way, the company's going out of business & everybody's screwed. Just the choice of language there is almost like assigning blame to the victim. If it's the users' BTC that got stolen, it implies it's somehow the users' fault. Really weasley choice of words.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @10:17PM
If you owe the exchange 10 bitcoins, that's your problem. If the exchange owes 120k bitcoins, that's your problem.