AWS Northern Virginia Data Center Overheating Disrupts Coinbase Trading

Coinbase is a major U.S. cryptocurrency exchange whose core trading systems rely on Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 cloud region. Cooling or power failures at a single data center can disrupt order matching, deposits, withdrawals and account services. The incident highlights the need for financial platforms to build redundancy across availability zones, as well as the risks of cloud concentration.

At 7:20 p.m. Eastern time on May 7, 2026, multiple cooling units failed simultaneously at AWS's use1-az4 data center in Northern Virginia, triggering safety shutdowns of server racks as they overheated. Coinbase was disrupted for nearly seven hours and temporarily switched to “cancel-only” mode, while saying customer funds were safe. It restored trading across all markets in phases on May 8. Services including FanDuel were also affected.