Coinbase users experienced prolonged service interruptions on Thursday into Friday morning after issues with Amazon Web Services infrastructure disrupted essential trading platforms, the cryptocurrency exchange reported. According to a statement posted on X early Friday, the outage commenced around 8 p.m. ET on Thursday afternoon when Coinbase’s systems identified increased error rates across various services.
“Coinbase detected heightened error rates in its multiple services around 8 p.m. ET, linked back to failures within AWS Availability Zone use1-az4 in the US-EAST-1 region,” stated Coinbase. Amazon refrained from commenting on the outage and directed attention to its Service Health Dashboard instead.
This disruption follows a similar incident in October involving AWS that temporarily incapacitated both Coinbase and Robinhood, preventing users from accessing their accounts or executing trades. While designed to recover from isolated availability zone failures, Coinbase noted that this situation involved multiple zones, leading to an extended downtime of essential trading services until AWS restored key managed services like temperature controls.
Users reported issues with app access, fund transfers, and trade executions. Downdetector saw a surge in reports starting at 6 p.m. ET, which persisted overnight before declining early Friday morning. Approximately one-third of the reports concerned fund transfers, another third involved trading difficulties, while around 29% pertained to problems with the Coinbase mobile application.
Coinbase confirmed that the main issue had been resolved and directed users with account-related queries to Coinbase Support. “A comprehensive analysis will be conducted,” Coinbase mentioned in its X post. “Details may evolve as our investigation progresses and further information is received from AWS’s official retrospective, once it becomes available.”
Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.
This outage occurred as Coinbase deepens its integration into cloud-based AI and stablecoin infrastructure via partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Stripe. The company is restructuring around an AI-first operational model as described by CEO Brian Armstrong. “AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era,” Armstrong wrote on X. “This represents a novel approach to work, necessitating the leveraging of AI across all aspects of our roles.”