Coinbase (COIN) reported a several-hour outage in crypto trading on Thursday, which the Nasdaq-listed exchange attributed to an outage at Amazon Web Services. The incident drew criticism as Coinbase continues to struggle with declining trading activity, quarterly losses and staff layoffs.
The crypto-trading platform said users were unable to trade across web and mobile services after failures hit several AWS Availability Zones in the US East region, located in Virginia.
“Coinbase experienced service disruptions due to increased temperatures in the affected AWS service,” the trading platform said in a status page update. Trading was later restored after the markets were briefly placed in a “cancel only” mode.
“This primary issue is now fully resolved – thank you for your patience,” Coinbase said Friday in an X post, adding that its team would investigate the incident. “Details may change as our investigation progresses and more information is received from AWS’s official retrospective as it is published.”
In a separate statement about X, Coinbase said systems initially flagged “high failure rates across multiple services” and engineers traced the problem to failures in the AWS infrastructure.
“Coinbase systems are designed to be resilient to a single zone outage,” the company said. “In this case, we observed failures that affected multiple AWS zones, causing an extended outage of core commerce services.”
However, the outage drew criticism from software engineer Gergely Orosz, formerly of Uber and Skype, who has over 310,000 followers on X.
“Unfortunate optics for Coinbase to have an hour-long outage when customers couldn’t trade, a few days after their CEO said how non-technical teams are sending code to production,” Orosz wrote Friday.
Coinbase has previously come under scrutiny due to outages during periods of high market volatility and infrastructure stress. In 2020, Coinbase experienced a brief outage when the price of bitcoin plunged 10% from $9,500 to $8,100 in 30 minutes. Other US exchanges, including Kraken, had reported all systems as operational during the same period. A week before that, Coinbase saw a similar outburst as bitcoin surged 15% to $8,900.
For Coinbase, which so far appears to be the only crypto exchange affected by the May 7, 2026 outage, the disruption comes at a time when the company is facing financial and operational challenges.
On Thursday, Coinbase shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading after it reported weaker-than-expected results for the first quarter of 2026 as falling crypto prices affected trading activity, one of the company’s main revenue streams. The company posted a loss of $1.49 per share, compared with analysts’ expectations for a profit of $0.27. Revenue reached $1.41 billion, below estimates of $1.52 billion.
It also follows the May 5 decision to cut its workforce by 14%, or about 660 employees, in response to adverse market conditions and AI challenges. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the cuts in an X post Tuesday, citing the “two forces” that converged in his company’s decision to cut staff.
