Key Takeaways:
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has restored trading after an outage of more than five hours that the company linked to a failure at a key Amazon Web Services data center. The incident locked traders out of their accounts and again exposed the fragility of critical financial infrastructure built on the public cloud.
"Problems with our platform were caused by the AWS outage," Coinbase said in a statement on its status page, confirming the root cause of its platform issues. The exchange announced that all markets were re-enabled for trading following service restoration.
The disruption stemmed from increased temperatures inside a single AWS data center in Northern Virginia, according to the cloud provider. AWS reported it was working to add cooling capacity but had no timeline for a full recovery, advising customers to shift traffic to alternative data centers. The outage also created technical and latency issues for derivatives marketplace CME Group, which said it completed essential maintenance before users could log back into its CME Direct platform.
This event underscores the significant operational risks for financial platforms that depend on a small number of dominant cloud providers. An extended outage prevents users from managing positions during volatile periods, potentially causing significant losses and undermining confidence in the exchange's reliability. The incident follows a major AWS outage in October 2025 and a 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction that hobbled systems from hospitals to banks, highlighting the vulnerabilities of interconnected technologies.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
