Coinbase (COIN) reported hours of disruption to cryptocurrency trading on Thursday, which the Nasdaq-listed exchange attributed to an outage in Amazon Web Services. The incident drew criticism as Coinbase continues to contend with declining trading activity, quarterly losses and employee layoffs.
The cryptocurrency trading platform said users were unable to trade across web and mobile services after an outage in multiple AWS Availability Zones in the US East region, located in Virginia.
“Coinbase experienced a service outage due to elevated temperatures on the affected AWS service,” the trading platform said in a status page update. Trading later resumed after the market briefly entered “cancel-only” mode.
“This major issue has now been fully resolved – thank you for your patience,” Coinbase said in an X post on Friday, adding that its team would investigate the incident. “Details are subject to change as our investigation progresses and as more information is received after the release of an official AWS review.”
In a separate statement about X, Coinbase said the system initially flagged “high error rates across multiple services,” and engineers traced the issue to a failure in AWS infrastructure.
“Coinbase systems are designed to handle single-region outages,” the company said. “In this case, we observed an outage that affected multiple AWS regions, resulting in a prolonged outage of core trading services.”
However, the outage drew criticism from software engineer Gergely Orosz, who has worked at Uber and Skype and has more than 310,000 followers on X.
“It’s unfortunate that Coinbase suffered an hours-long outage after customers were unable to transact, just days after its CEO stated how non-technical teams would get code into production,” Oros wrote on Friday.
Coinbase has faced scrutiny in the past for service outages during periods of severe market volatility and infrastructure stress. In 2020, Coinbase experienced a brief outage, with Bitcoin prices plummeting 10% from $9,500 to $8,100 in 30 minutes. Other U.S. exchanges, including Kraken, reported that all systems were operational during the same period. Coinbase experienced a similar outage the week before when Bitcoin rose 15% to $8,900.
For its part, Coinbase appears to be the only cryptocurrency exchange so far affected by the May 7, 2026 outage, which comes at a time when the company is facing financial and operational challenges.
Coinbase reported weaker-than-expected first-quarter 2026 results on Thursday, with shares falling more than 5% in after-hours trading as falling cryptocurrency prices hurt trading activity in one of the company’s main sources of revenue. The company reported a loss of $1.49 per share, while analysts expected a profit of $0.27 per share. Revenue was $1.41 billion, missing estimates of $1.52 billion.
The company also decided on May 5 to lay off 14% of its employees, or approximately 660 employees, in response to adverse market conditions and artificial intelligence challenges. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the layoffs in an X post on Tuesday, citing “two forces” that combined to contribute to the company’s decision to cut jobs.