- AWS “temperature” issues
- A disastrous earnings miss
Users of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States experienced a massive technical outage that brought trading on Coinbase to a grinding halt.
The platform’s sudden collapse forced the exchange to place all markets into “Cancel Only” mode.
Frustrated traders were unable to execute transactions for several hours.
Major Outage Halts Trading on Coinbase
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The catastrophic technical failure is a brutal capstone to an already punishing day for the company.
This happened just hours after Coinbase delivered a dismal first-quarter earnings report that sent its stock tumbling.
AWS “temperature” issues
The prolonged downtime has been caused by a physical hardware issue at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center.
According to official updates from Coinbase Support and the platform’s status page, the exchange suffered severe service disruptions due to “increased temperatures in the affected Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the AWS US-EAST-1 Region.” Coinbase’s trading engine became entirely unresponsive as a result of this.
“Our team is investigating this issue and will provide an update. Your funds are safe,” the exchange said.
Despite the reassurances, the prolonged downtime drew sharp criticism from the tech and crypto communities regarding Coinbase’s backend architecture.
Some were disappointed by the fact that a performance in a single localized AWS region was enough to completely paralyze a financial service of Coinbase’s magnitude.
A disastrous earnings miss
The timing of the site crash could not have been worse. Yesterday, Coinbase reported a staggering surprise loss of $1.49 per share. Revenue also missed the mark, coming in at $1.41 billion compared to the expected $1.52 billion. Due to the dismal results, the shares of the leading US exchange plunged by 4% in after-hours trading.
The exchange is attempting to build an “everything exchange” with stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and so on, but the transition is proving painful.
The company recently announced its decision to fire 14% of its workforce, equating to 700 jobs.