Coinbase announced that it has restored its transaction services, which were halted following an outage in Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The problem stemmed from failures in some infrastructure components caused by rising temperatures at an AWS data center in northern Virginia, USA.
During the outage, Coinbase switched the market to “cancel-only” mode to protect user transactions. In this mode, users could only cancel existing orders, and no new buy or sell transactions could be made. The company later gradually reopened trading services, first stabilizing the market in “auction” mode before returning it to normal trading.
Coinbase stated that the systems are normally designed to be resilient to failures that might occur in a single AWS access zone. However, in this recent incident, the simultaneous occurrence of problems in multiple access zones resulted in prolonged disruptions to core computing services.
During the outage, users experienced connection and transaction problems on both the web platform and mobile applications. These access problems, particularly during a period of high volatility, caused brief concern among investors.
The company announced that all exchange services, along with web and mobile application functionality, have fully returned to normal. Coinbase also stated that it is working on additional measures to increase infrastructure resilience to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
The recent reliance of cryptocurrency exchanges heavily on cloud infrastructure providers has once again highlighted the potential for technical issues with global service providers like AWS to have a direct impact on the markets.
*This is not investment advice.
