Coinbase restores trading after AWS outage disrupts markets

Crypto exchange Coinbase has restored trading across its exchange, website and mobile apps after an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage forced the crypto platform to limit markets before reopening them in stages.

The service disruption began around 8:00 pm ET on Thursday, when Coinbase systems flagged high error rates across multiple services. AWS said increased temperatures in a Northern Virginia data center impaired some infrastructure and forced it to shift traffic away from the affected Availability Zone.

The exchange placed markets in cancel-only mode during the disruption, then moved through auction mode before re-enabling trading, according to Coinbase public updates. Cancel-only mode allows users to cancel existing orders but prevents new trades from being executed. After that, Coinbase Support said all Coinbase Exchange markets were re-enabled for trading at 7:48 am UTC, followed by coinbase.com and its iOS and Android apps at 9:25 am UTC. 

The incident temporarily limited users’ ability to trade on one of the largest US crypto exchanges and underscored how outages at major cloud providers can disrupt access to digital asset platforms.

Source: Coinbase Support

Coinbase says AWS failures affected multiple data center zones 

Coinbase said in a later update that the disruption began around 8:00 pm ET on May 7, when its systems flagged high error rates across multiple services. The exchange said it traced the errors to AWS failures in Availability Zone use1-az4 in the US-EAST-1 Region, referring to a separate data center cluster within AWS’s Northern Virginia cloud region.

The company said its systems are designed to withstand an outage in a single AWS Availability Zone and recover quickly if one occurs. However, Coinbase said it observed failures affecting multiple AWS zones, meaning more than one such data center cluster, which caused an extended outage of core trading services.

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Coinbase said the primary issue has been fully resolved and that its team will conduct a full analysis. The exchange said details may change as its investigation progresses and as AWS publishes its official retrospective.

Coinbase directed Cointelegraph to its existing public updates when asked for additional comment.

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