Coinbase Reports Extensive Outage on May 7, 2026, Caused by AWS Data Center Failure

Coinbase, one of the largest players in the cryptocurrency industry, experienced a significant outage on May 7, 2026.

The incident lasted for approximately eight hours, affecting trading, deposits, withdrawals, and other services across all Coinbase products. This includes Coinbase Exchange, where retail customers were unable to trade or complete related account actions, such as buying, selling, sending, receiving, depositing, and withdrawing.

The outage was caused by a combination of factors, including the failure of multiple chiller units in an AWS data center, which triggered a thermal-safety shutdown of affected racks. This, in turn, took EC2 instances and EBS volumes offline, impacting not only Coinbase but also several major services on the public internet that night.

Coinbase's matching engine was pinned to a single building within the AWS data center, lacking an automated ability to fail over to another availability zone. This architectural issue led to a delay in recovery, as engineers worked through the night to restore quorum and reopen markets. The company also experienced issues with its Kafka event-streaming infrastructure, which further extended the outage.

In response to the incident, Coinbase has outlined several commitments to improve its resilience and infrastructure. These include implementing warm cross-zone standby design for matching engines on Coinbase Exchange, migrating 2-AZ Kafka clusters to 3-AZ deployments, and working with AWS to root-cause and remediate issues related to the control-plane defect.

Coinbase has acknowledged that it fell short of its standard for availability during this incident and has expressed a commitment to delivering seamless, uninterrupted experiences for its customers in the future.