Coinbase has fully restored trading operations across its exchange platform, website, and mobile applications after a technical disruption linked to an outage involving Amazon Web Services (AWS) temporarily affected market activity.
The issue began Thursday evening around 8:00 pm ET, when Coinbase detected elevated error rates across several internal systems. According to AWS, unusually high temperatures at one of its Northern Virginia data centers impacted infrastructure performance, forcing traffic to be redirected away from the affected Availability Zone.
During the disruption, Coinbase temporarily placed its markets into “cancel-only” mode, allowing users to remove existing orders while preventing new trades from being executed. The platform later shifted into auction mode before gradually restoring full trading functionality.
Coinbase confirmed that all exchange markets were reopened for trading by 7:48 am UTC. Access to coinbase.com, along with the company’s iOS and Android applications, was restored later at approximately 9:25 am UTC.
The incident briefly restricted trading access for users on one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States and highlighted the broader risks associated with dependence on major cloud service providers.
In a subsequent update, Coinbase explained that the disruption was connected to failures within AWS’s US-EAST-1 Region, specifically involving the Availability Zone known as use1-az4. Availability Zones are separate infrastructure clusters designed to provide redundancy within AWS cloud regions.
Coinbase stated that its systems are typically built to handle the failure of a single AWS zone without major service interruptions. However, the company observed simultaneous issues across multiple zones during this event, leading to a longer-than-expected outage affecting key trading services.
The exchange said the core issue has now been resolved and that its engineering teams will conduct a comprehensive review of the incident. Coinbase also noted that additional details may emerge as its internal investigation continues and AWS releases its official post-incident analysis.
When contacted for further comment, Coinbase referred reporters to its previously published public updates regarding the outage.
The event serves as another reminder of how infrastructure disruptions at major cloud providers can significantly impact cryptocurrency platforms and broader digital asset markets.
