Coinbase trading knocked offline after AWS data center hardware overheats

Coinbase suffered a major outage that halted trading for several hours after a hardware problem at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center triggered elevated temperatures in an affected AWS US East 1 Availability Zone (use1az4), according to updates from the company's support team and status page. The disruption forced the largest U.S. crypto exchange to place all markets into "cancel-only" mode as its trading engine became unresponsive, leaving users unable to execute trades. Coinbase said it was investigating and that customer funds remained safe. The incident drew sharp criticism across the tech and crypto communities, with some questioning how an issue in a single AWS region could take down a major financial services platform. The outage landed on an already bruising day for Coinbase. Just hours earlier, the company posted disappointing first-quarter results, reporting a loss of $1.49 per share and revenue of $1.41 billion versus expectations of $1.52 billion. Coinbase shares fell 4% in after-hours trading. The company has been pushing to become a "one-stop" exchange spanning stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets and other products, a transition it has acknowledged is challenging. Coinbase recently announced a 14% workforce reduction, cutting about 700 jobs.