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Coinbase suffered a multi-hour trading outage on Thursday after failures hit multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) availability zones in Virginia. The exchange said its systems are built to handle a single-zone failure but were overwhelmed when several zones went down simultaneously, knocking out core trading services across web and mobile.

Multi-Zone AWS Failures Knock Out Coinbase Trading

Coinbase said the disruption began when its engineers flagged high error rates across multiple services and traced the problem to AWS infrastructure in the U.S. Eastern Region.

“Coinbase systems are designed to be resilient to a single zone outage,” the company said on X. “In this case, we observed failures impacting multiple AWS zones, which caused an extended outage of core trading services.”

The exchange said elevated temperatures in the affected AWS facilities contributed to the failures. Trading was briefly placed into “cancel only” mode before full service was restored. Coinbase confirmed on Friday that the issue had been fully resolved and said it would investigate further once AWS publishes its own retrospective.

Coinbase appeared to be the only major crypto exchange affected by the outage.

Outage Lands After Weak Q1 Earnings and a 14% Workforce Cut

The disruption landed during an already rough stretch. On Thursday, Coinbase shares fell more than 5% in after-hours trading after the company reported weaker-than-expected first-quarter results. Revenue came in at $1.41 billion, below analyst estimates of $1.52 billion.

The company posted a loss of $1.49 per share, compared with expectations for a $0.27 profit. Declining crypto prices weighed on trading activity, one of the firm’s main revenue streams.

Three days earlier, on May 5, chief executive Brian Armstrong announced the company would cut its workforce by 14%, roughly 660 employees. Armstrong cited negative market conditions and AI-related challenges as the two forces behind the decision.

The Exchange Has a History of Outages During Market Stress

Coinbase has faced criticism for outages during volatile trading periods before. In 2020, the platform went down as Bitcoin crashed 10% in 30 minutes, while other U.S. exchanges including Kraken reported normal operations. A week before that incident, Coinbase experienced a similar outage during a 15% Bitcoin rally.

Software engineer Gergely Orosz, who has more than 310,000 followers on X and previously worked at Uber and Skype, criticized the timing.

“Unfortunate optics for Coinbase to have an hours-long outage when customers could not trade, a few days after their CEO said how non-technical teams are shipping code to production,” Orosz wrote on Friday.

Thursday’s outage was caused by AWS infrastructure failures rather than Coinbase’s own trading systems, but the pattern of downtime during critical moments continues to draw scrutiny over the exchange’s technical resilience.