What caused the Coinbase service disruption?

The disruption was caused by overheating issues at an Amazon Web Services data centre in Northern Virginia. Elevated temperatures reportedly forced some server racks offline within AWS’s US-EAST-1 region.

How did the outage affect Coinbase?

Coinbase said customers experienced degraded performance across web and mobile services. Some users were temporarily unable to complete transactions during the incident.

What does “cancel only” mode mean on Coinbase?

“Cancel only” mode allows users to cancel existing orders but prevents new trades from being placed. Exchanges often use this setting during technical disruptions to stabilise markets before fully restoring trading.

Were customer funds at risk during the outage?

Coinbase said customer funds remained safe throughout the disruption. The issue primarily affected platform availability and transaction processing rather than asset custody.

Why is AWS important to crypto exchanges?

Many crypto platforms rely heavily on cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS for hosting trading systems, databases and application services. Large outages can therefore affect exchange operations globally.

What is the AWS US-EAST-1 region?

US-EAST-1 is one of AWS’s largest and most widely used cloud infrastructure regions, located primarily in Northern Virginia. Many major technology and financial platforms host services there because of its scale and connectivity.

Did the outage affect other companies besides Coinbase?

Yes. Reports indicated that FanDuel and potentially other internet platforms also experienced disruptions tied to the AWS overheating incident.

Why do cloud outages matter for crypto markets?

Crypto markets operate continuously and rely on highly available infrastructure. Even short disruptions can affect trading activity, order execution and investor confidence during volatile market conditions.

AWS outage disrupts Coinbase trading services

Written by Isaac FrancisPublished May. 8 2026Last Updated May. 8 2026

Amazon Web Services said it was working to restore normal operations after overheating issues at a Northern Virginia data centre disrupted services for Coinbase and other major online platforms.

AWS said the incident affected infrastructure within its US-EAST-1 region, where elevated temperatures forced impacted server racks offline while engineers worked to stabilise conditions.

The outage affected Coinbase trading services, with the crypto exchange warning customers of degraded performance across both web and mobile platforms.

Coinbase said some users were temporarily unable to complete transactions while its teams worked to restore system functionality.

“We will begin the process to re-enable trading on our markets shortly,”

Coinbase said, adding that all markets would initially enter “cancel only” mode before normal trading resumed.

The exchange stressed that customer funds remained safe throughout the disruption despite the temporary operational issues.

AWS later reported early signs of recovery and said teams were continuing efforts to reduce temperatures and bring affected infrastructure back online.

The outage also reportedly affected other internet services including sports betting platform FanDuel, highlighting the broader dependence of major technology and financial platforms on large-scale cloud infrastructure providers.