Coinbase Blames AWS US-EAST-1 Zone Failures for Trading Outage
Failures across multiple AWS availability zones in US-EAST-1 on May 7 disrupted Coinbase core trading services, traced to use1-az4, prompting temporary halts and staged re-enables.
On May 7 Coinbase reported that failures across multiple Amazon Web Services availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region disrupted its core trading systems and led to temporary halts. Around 8 p.m. ET, monitoring flagged high error rates across services; engineers traced the problem to availability zone use1-az4 and paused trading while teams worked to restore systems.
The exchange said its infrastructure is built to tolerate a single availability-zone outage and recover quickly, but errors spread across multiple zones and exceeded those recovery conditions. Customers experienced interruptions to order entry and other trading functions while AWS addressed elevated temperatures and issues in managed services in the affected zone.
Coinbase described a controlled process to resume trading that first placed all markets into “Cancel Only” mode before restoring full order entry. At 3:48 a.m. ET on May 8, the exchange posted that all markets had been re-enabled on Coinbase Exchange.
Updates on the company’s support channel included: “We observed failures impacting multiple AWS zones, which caused an extended outage of core trading services.” The firm added: “Our team will conduct a full analysis. Details may change as our investigation progresses and more information is received from AWS’s official retrospective, once published.”
Coinbase did not disclose how many users were affected or which specific trading functions saw the highest error rates. The company said it will wait for AWS’s official incident retrospective to complete its internal review and determine any necessary follow-up steps or customer notices.
The outage came hours after Coinbase released its first-quarter results on May 7, which reported record crypto trading market share, $202 billion in quarterly trading volume, annualized retail derivatives revenue above $200 million and $294 billion in assets held on the platform for the quarter.
Availability zones are isolated locations within a cloud region that providers use to add redundancy. Coinbase’s account indicates the immediate cause involved increased temperatures in use1-az4 and related impacts on Amazon Managed Services, which required AWS teams to restore temperature controls and platform functions. Coinbase plans to incorporate AWS’s incident report in its final analysis.
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