Coinbase (COIN) on Thursday reported a multi-hour disruption in cryptocurrency trading, which the Nasdaq-listed exchange attributed to an outage in Amazon Web Services. The incident has drawn criticism as Coinbase continues to grapple with declining business activity, quarterly losses and staff layoffs.
The crypto trading platform said users were unable to transact via web and mobile services after outages affected multiple AWS Availability Zones in the US Eastern region, located in Virginia.
“Coinbase experienced service disruptions due to rising temperatures on the affected AWS service,” the trading platform said in a status page update. Trading was later restored after markets briefly went into “cancel only” mode.
“This major issue is now completely 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 the official AWS retrospective, once released.”
In a separate statement about
“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, resulting in a prolonged outage of core business services.”
However, the outage drew criticism from software engineer Gergely Orosz, a former Uber and Skype employee who has more than 310,000 followers on X.
“It’s unfortunate optics for Coinbase to have an hours-long outage when customers couldn’t trade, a few days after its CEO said non-technical teams are pushing code to production,” Orosz wrote on Friday.
Coinbase has faced scrutiny in the past due to outages during periods of high market volatility and infrastructure stress. In 2020, Coinbase experienced a brief outage when the price of bitcoin plummeted 10%, from $9,500 to $8,100 in 30 minutes. Other US exchanges, including Kraken, had reported that all systems were operational during the same period. A week before that, Coinbase experienced a similar outage as bitcoin rose 15% to $8,900.
For Coinbase, which as of now appears to be the only crypto exchange affected by the May 7, 2026 outage, the outage comes as the company faces financial and operational challenges.
On Thursday, Coinbase shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading after it reported weaker-than-expected first-quarter 2026 results as declining cryptocurrency prices hit trading activity, one of the company’s main sources of revenue. The company posted a loss of $1.49 per share, compared with analysts’ expectations for a profit of $0.27. Revenue came in at $1.41 billion, missing estimates of $1.52 billion.
It also follows its May 5 decision to cut its workforce by 14% or approximately 660 employees in response to negative market conditions and AI challenges. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the cuts in an X publication on Tuesday, citing the “two forces” that converged in his company’s decision to cut staff.
