Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
Coinbase users were unable to trade for hours last night after a widespread AWS infrastructure failure disrupted the exchange’s core systems.
What's the Scoop?
- AWS Knockout: Coinbase suffered a multi-hour outage on Thursday after an overheating failure impacted several Amazon Web Services (AWS) availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, preventing users from executing trades across the crypto exchange's web and mobile platforms. Other platforms impacted by the service outage included sports gambling platform FanDuel.
- Inauspicious Timing: Earlier this week, Coinbase announced that it was laying off 14% of its staff, attributing the headcount reduction partially to productivity gains from artificial intelligence and touting that AI enables even non-technical teams to ship production code. Immediately prior to its outage last night, Coinbase posted an earnings disappointment, revealing both top and bottom line misses for the first quarter of 2026.
On May 7th Coinbase experienced service disruptions. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 8, 2026
→ Around 8PM ET, Coinbase systems flagged high error rates across multiple services.
→ We traced these errors to amazon failures in Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the AWS US-EAST-1…