Coinbase Hit by AWS Outage, Renewing Debate on Cloud Dependence

The disruption, centred on AWS's US-EAST-1 region, is causing latency and connection failures across several major platforms, including Coinbase, Venmo and Fortnite.

Funds secure

Crypto markets remained essentially flat, with Bitcoin hovering around $111,000 and Ether near $4,049.

In a post on X, Coinbase Support said: "We're aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage. All funds are safe." AWS confirmed it was mitigating a network subsystem issue and said most services were showing “signs of recovery,” though engineers were still addressing residual delays. 

AWS said a network subsystem degradation had disrupted load balancing across critical services used by major fintech and cloud-reliant platforms. Coinbase said it has implemented a fix and is monitoring results.

The incident marks the second significant AWS-related disruption affecting crypto exchanges this year, following an April event that hit Binance and KuCoin. 

Exchanges reassess cloud risk exposure

The episode underscores a growing operational paradox for digital-asset firms.

Despite being built on decentralized technology, at the protocol level, their core trading systems, wallets, and APIs remain hosted on centralized clouds. 

AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure collectively host more than 70 per cent of centralized exchange traffic, leaving the industry vulnerable to shared-infrastructure risk..

Coinbase’s entire international exchange runs natively on AWS, designed to deliver ultra-low-latency trading at scale. It uses AWS managed services such as Amazon Aurora for high-speed, low-latency database operations and EC2 z1d instances for compute-intensive workloads. 

Regulators and enterprise clients have urged AWS to strengthen redundancy standards for financial-market participants, warning that repeated outages could heighten systemic vulnerability in markets that depend on continuous access.