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Coinbase Is Back Online After AWS Outage Shut Down Trading for Hours
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Coinbase has fully restored trading across its exchange, website, and mobile apps after an Amazon Web Services outage forced the platform to halt new trades for an extended period beginning Thursday evening. The disruption started around 8:00 PM ET on May 7 when Coinbase systems detected high error rates across multiple services, traced to AWS failures in a Northern Virginia data center cluster. During the outage, the exchange placed markets in cancel-only mode — allowing users to cancel existing orders but blocking any new trades from being executed — before moving through auction mode and eventually re-enabling full trading. Coinbase Exchange markets were restored at 7:48 AM UTC, followed by the full coinbase.com website and iOS and Android apps at 9:25 AM UTC, meaning the disruption lasted approximately 12 hours from initial detection to complete restoration across all platforms.
For users who needed to trade during that window, the timing was particularly frustrating given the volatility that can characterize overnight crypto sessions. Coinbase confirmed that the primary issue has been fully resolved and that its team will conduct a full post-incident analysis, with the caveat that details may change as the investigation progresses and as AWS publishes its own official retrospective. The incident highlights a risk that tends to receive less attention in crypto infrastructure discussions than smart contract exploits or exchange hacks: the concentration of major crypto platforms on shared cloud infrastructure means that a physical or technical failure at a major cloud provider can simultaneously affect access to digital asset trading for millions of users, without any security breach or protocol failure occurring on the crypto side at all.
