A thermal event at an Amazon $AMZN Web Services data center in Northern Virginia triggered a cascade of disruptions that left Coinbase without functioning transaction services for close to seven hours on Friday.
AWS said the trouble began on May 7 at 4:20 PM PDT, when a thermal event caused a power loss affecting EC2 instances and EBS volumes in a single availability zone — use1-az4 — within its US-EAST-1 region. Other availability zones in the region were not affected, the company said.
Trading across all Coinbase markets was eventually restored, the company confirmed. The disruption appears to have begun around 9 a.m. in Singapore and lasted until approximately 4 p.m. local time, based on Bloomberg's reporting. A Coinbase spokesperson said the outage prevented users from executing trades, moving funds, or using core exchange features, and that the consumer-facing mobile app experienced degraded performance throughout.
AWS said engineers were engaged within minutes of the thermal event and began working on multiple mitigations. By 9:12 PM PDT, power was restored to a subset of the affected infrastructure. The company then focused on bringing additional cooling capacity online to recover the remaining hardware in a controlled manner, though that work took longer than anticipated.
As of an update issued at 3:54 AM PDT on May 8, AWS said some services — including IoT Core, ELB, NAT Gateway, and Redshift — had seen recovery, while Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon SageMaker remained impaired. AWS said it expected full recovery to take several more hours and recommended that customers requiring immediate restoration launch replacement resources in unaffected availability zones or restore from EBS snapshots.
Friday's service failure arrived at the end of an already bruising stretch for the crypto exchange. Earlier in the week, Coinbase disclosed it was eliminating positions across roughly 14% of its approximately 5,000-person workforce, framing the move as part of a broader push toward automation and artificial intelligence capabilities. Then on Thursday, the company released quarterly earnings showing revenue of $1.41 billion — a 31% drop that fell short of analyst expectations — alongside a net loss of $394 million.