Coinbase said it has restored full trading services after an outage lasting more than two hours on 7 May, which it said was caused by a thermal event at an Amazon Web Services data centre in Northern Virginia.
Coinbase Restores Trading After Two-Hour AWS Outage Hits US-EAST-1 Region
8 May 2026 - 11:00 CEST
By Matt Neill
The exchange first flagged degraded performance at 00:56 UTC, with customers unable to transact on web and mobile. By 02:37 UTC Coinbase said it had identified the cause as overheating in AWS's US-EAST-1 availability zone use1-az4, which caused a power loss damaging hardware in the affected racks.
All markets were placed in Cancel Only mode, allowing customers to revoke existing orders but not submit new ones. Markets then moved to auction mode, during which customers could post limit orders and view indicative open prices for a minimum of ten minutes before matching resumed.
Coinbase confirmed on X at 07:48 UTC on 8 May that all markets have been re-enabled for trading. Customer funds were confirmed safe throughout.
Centralised cloud problem
The outage is the second AWS-linked disruption at Coinbase since October 2025, when a DNS resolution failure in the same US-EAST-1 region cascaded across dozens of services simultaneously and knocked out Coinbase alongside Robinhood, Venmo and several major consumer platforms.
The Northern Virginia hub is AWS's oldest and most heavily trafficked region, and any failures carry a blast radius that extends across financial platforms, consumer applications and government systems.
The outage came on the same day Coinbase reported a net loss of $394mn for the first quarter of 2026. On 6 May, it announced a 14% workforce reduction.
Persistent structural question
The episode reinforces a longstanding tension in the digital asset industry. Despite operating on decentralised blockchain infrastructure at the protocol level, major centralised exchanges run their core trading systems on shared cloud providers.
AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure collectively host more than 70% of centralised exchange traffic. During the October 2025 outage, Binance, Kraken and OKX remained operational, having distributed their infrastructure across multiple providers or regions. Coinbase's entire international exchange runs natively on AWS.
Regulators and institutional clients have repeatedly called on cloud providers to strengthen redundancy standards for financial-market participants, and the recurrence of US-EAST-1 incidents is likely to renew that pressure.
