Coinbase (COIN) reported a multi-hour outage in crypto trading on Thursday, which the Nasdaq-listed exchange attributed to an Amazon Web Services outage. The incident sparked criticism as Coinbase continues to face declining business activity, quarterly losses and layoffs.
The cryptocurrency trading platform said users were unable to transact on web and mobile services after outages hit multiple AWS Availability Zones in the Eastern region of the United States, located in Virginia.
“Coinbase has experienced service interruptions due to increased temperatures in the affected AWS service,” the trading platform said in a status page update. Trading was later restored after markets were briefly placed in “cancel only” mode.
“This primary issue is now fully resolved – thank you for your patience,” Coinbase said in an X article on Friday, 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 on X, Coinbase said systems initially reported “high error rates across multiple services” and that engineers attributed the problem to failures in AWS infrastructure.
“Coinbase systems are designed to withstand a single zone outage,” the company said. “In this case, we observed outages affecting multiple AWS zones, which caused a prolonged outage of major trading services.”
However, the disruption drew criticism from software engineer Gergely Orosz, formerly at Uber and Skype, who has more than 310,000 subscribers on X.
“It is unfortunate that Coinbase is experiencing a multi-hour outage when customers cannot trade, days after their CEO reported how non-technical teams were shipping code to production,” Orosz wrote on Friday.
Coinbase has faced scrutiny in the past due to outages occurring during periods of high market volatility and infrastructure stress. In 2020, Coinbase experienced a brief outage when the price of Bitcoin collapsed 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 prior, Coinbase experienced a similar outage when bitcoin rose 15% to $8,900.
For Coinbase, which, for now, 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.
Shares of Coinbase fell more than 5% after hours on Thursday after reporting weaker-than-expected first-quarter 2026 results as falling crypto prices hit trading activity, one of the company’s main sources of revenue. The company reported a loss of $1.49 per share, while analysts were expecting a profit of $0.27. Revenue came in at $1.41 billion, below estimates of $1.52 billion.
It also follows its May 5 decision to reduce its workforce by 14%, or approximately 660 employees, in response to negative market conditions and AI challenges. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the elimination of an X position on Tuesday, citing the “two forces” that converged in his company’s decision to reduce its workforce.
