CoinMarketCap and Coindesk, online resources for finding the price of cryptocurrencies, have gone down.

The websites’ crash comes amid another crash of cryptocurrency values; bitcoin, ethereum, and other digital currencies dropped dramatically in the wake of a coming Chinese crackdown on the use and trading of virtual currencies.

The price of bitcoin specifically has dropped by over $10,000 in the last few hours, with customers reporting difficulties in accessing accounts.

CoinMarketCap listed market cap, price, volume, supply, 24-hour price change, and a graph of that price over 24 hours. Now, however, visitors are met with a 500 Internal Server Error.

“Sorry for the inconvenience. Please report this message”, an error message reads on the website.

The Independent has reached out to CoinMarketCap for comment. Coindesk was not immediately available for comment.

Before the website went down, it reported that the amount of trading had increased as people sought to sell their coins and make some of their money back before the plunge continued.

More than $250 billion of cryptocurrency has been traded over the last 24 hours, it showed, representing a near 40 per cent increase.

In China, three state-backed organisations – which include the China Banking Association – had issued a warning that digital currencies are not “real”, and that they “should not and cannot be used as currency in the market”.

The statement also said that the “speculation activities” that have surrounded virtual currencies were putting people’s property and the “normal order of economy and finance” at risk.

The governor of the Bank of England had recently issued a similar warning: that cryptocurrencies have “no intrinsic value” and people who invest in them should be “prepared to lose all [their] money”.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had historically been an advocate of digital currencies, also recently announced that the car company would not be accepting payment in cryptocurrency, causing a smaller crash in the market.