Overview
- Coinbase traced Thursday night’s outage, detected around 8 p.m. ET, to failures in AWS’s US-EAST-1 use1-az4 zone and put markets in cancel-only and then auction mode before restoring trading early Friday.
- AWS said a thermal event caused a loss of power at a single Northern Virginia data center, shifted traffic away from the affected zone, restored cooling capacity, and reported most services recovered with some EC2 instances and EBS volumes still impaired.
- FanDuel and CME Group also reported platform issues during the AWS disruption, with CME later restoring access without naming a cause.
- Coinbase told customers funds were safe, while CEO Brian Armstrong called the outage never acceptable and said the exchange’s low‑latency design concentrated key systems in one availability zone where backup paths did not fail over as planned.
- AWS and Coinbase promised detailed postmortems, and the episode renewed scrutiny of big platforms’ reliance on a few cloud providers and the tradeoffs between cross‑zone resilience and speed.