Coinbase was down for over six hours due to an Amazon Web Services issue before the American crypto exchange giant finally re-enabled trading on “all markets”.
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Another AWS Outage Impacting Trading
The AWS issue impacted crypto trading on both the web and mobile interfaces of Coinbase, directly affecting users’ ability to make transactions. “We are aware that customers may be experiencing degraded performance at this time due to an AWS outage,” Coinbase Support acknowledged, adding that customer funds are safe.
“Coinbase experienced service disruptions due to increased temperatures in the affected AWS service.”
All markets have been re-enabled for trading on Coinbase Exchange. https://t.co/WQtg90bNqC
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 8, 2026
Amazon also confirmed that the issue was due to an increase in temperatures within a single data centre in northern Virginia.
Although Coinbase took a few hours to address the issue, it initially put the markets in “cancel-only” mode before re-enabling trading. “During 'Cancel Only' mode, all resting orders are cancellable. Market and limit orders are not accepted,” the exchange explained.
It later moved the markets to ‘auction mode’, allowing customers to post limit orders and view the resulting indicative opening price. “The books will be in auction mode for a minimum of 10 minutes, during which no matches will occur,” the crypto exchange explained. “Upon completion of the auction, crossed orders will be matched at the opening price.”
Coinbase experienced service disruptions due to increased temperatures in the affected Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the AWS US-EAST-1 Region.
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 8, 2026
We will begin the process to re-enable trading on our markets shortly. All markets would be placed in “Cancel Only” mode before we…
It restored all services at around 1 am PDT.
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Coinbase, however, was not the only popular trading venue affected by the AWS outage. It also impacted the world’s largest derivatives trading marketplace, CME, which confirmed the restoration of its services without publicly identifying the cause.
Infrastructure Is Key, but Outages Are Common
AWS serves as the infrastructure backbone for a significant portion of the financial services industry. However, its outages are not unheard of. Last year, a couple of AWS outages disrupted activities on multiple trading platforms, including major crypto exchanges.
Another notable infrastructure issue last year that impacted the financial services industry was the Cloudflare outage. The three-hour technical fault on the platform disrupted parts of the internet and affected several broker websites, including Monaxa, Skilling.com, Xtrade, and FXPro.
