Polymarket Pauses Trading After Security Incident at Third-Party Provider

Polymarket, an online platform where users trade on the outcomes of future events, temporarily halted trading on its international platform on Thursday, October 29, 2026. The pause followed a security incident that compromised a third-party provider, according to The Guardian.

Trading was paused for about an hour and resumed on Thursday afternoon. The company said it halted trading out of an abundance of caution after identifying and fixing the issue affecting its international platform. It also said it would fully reimburse all affected traders, and that it had referred the incident to a law enforcement agency in the United Kingdom.

Bloomberg reported that the halt came after reports of customers losing money. BleepingComputer reported that hackers had compromised a third-party service and that the incident involved a crypto-draining script, a type of malicious code used to pull funds out of cryptocurrency wallets.

Reports linked the source of the breach to DebugBear, a UK-based company that offers website performance-monitoring tools, which track how quickly web pages load. DebugBear's website was unavailable on Thursday afternoon. The company posted on X that it had been impacted by an ongoing security incident, and advised clients using one of its products to remove the embed code, a snippet of code that places external content on a web page, from their websites.

Separately, trading is blocked on polymarket.com for users in the United States. Visitors there are directed to polymarket.us to trade prediction markets.