Coinbase Restarts Trading After AWS Outage, Says Major Issues Are Resolved

Coinbase, the US cryptocurrency exchange, restored trading services after an Amazon Web Services outage temporarily disrupted parts of its platform.

Cointelegraph reported on May 8 that Coinbase detected elevated error rates across its exchange, website and mobile app at about 8 p.m. Eastern time on May 7. The company then shifted the entire market into cancel-only mode, preventing new orders, and later resumed trading in stages through an auction mode.

In cancel-only mode, users can cancel existing orders but cannot place new trades.

Coinbase said all of its trading services had resumed by May 8.

The outage was attributed to rising temperatures at an AWS data center in Northern Virginia. Coinbase said some of its infrastructure was affected by the data center disruption and that it rerouted traffic away from the impacted availability zone.

The company said its systems are designed to withstand an outage in a single AWS availability zone. In this case, however, disruptions occurred across multiple AWS availability zones, prolonging the interruption to core trading services.

"All major issues have now been fully resolved," Coinbase said, adding that its internal teams will conduct a full review. The company also said details may change after AWS releases its official post-mortem.