Key Takeaways:
- The Coinbase incident is one in which the company said they experienced “significant” issues with the performance of their platform because of a massive AWS service disruption.
- The incident was traced to overheating and power problems in AWS’s US-East-1 data center.
- AWS confirmed that it is still working to recover from the incident, indicating that some services, including EC2 and EBS, are still impacted.
Coinbase, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchange, was severely impacted by a widespread outage of Amazon Web Services that affected services related to Coinbase’s infrastructure. It caused connectivity and problems with some trading and user transactions on web and mobile services, as well as causing these transactions to take longer.
While staffers worked to restore back full functioning, Coinbase has assured its customers they were still safe.
AWS Infrastructure Failure Disrupts Coinbase Operations
Coinbase Support initially responded on X to users reporting low performance, stating that they were dealing with issues due to an outage in AWS impacting other cloud services.
Later, the exchange confirmed the problem had to do with a larger AWS disruption and reported that it is “actively monitoring” the problem and is working to restore service.
The down time actually started within AWS’s US-EAST-1 Region, in the availability zone of use1-az4 in Northern Virginia. The issue started due to the warmer temperatures in a single data center leading to cooling system failures and impact to hardware, AWS status updates noted.
During the event, AWC said instances on AWS EC2, EBS volumes, and a number of supporting services had higher latency-and-error rates.
Later, the company reported that during the thermal event some of the hardware lost power, necessitating AWS to reroute traffic past the impacted zone and stabilizing temperatures.
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Coinbase Trading Impact Intensifies
Exchange Confirms Temporary Trading Restrictions
As the shutdown extended into its escalation, some Coinbase trades were reported as failing, log-ins were reported as unable to work, as well as transfers were delayed, both on web and cellular apps.
Later, some markets transitioned into a “cancel-only” mode for a while, enabling traders to cancel their orders but not place any new trades during the time it was in a ‘cancel-only mode’ to help with initiating the processes of stabilization.
The company said normal trading operations would gradually return once platform reliability improved.
AWS updates throughout the incident showed recovery progress remained slower than expected. Additional cooling capacity was restored incrementally while in an attempt to safely recover the impacted server racks.
At one point AWS did warn customers that provisioning may be exceedingly slow and suggested redistributing workloads to the regions unaffected availability zones within the US-East-1 region.
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Crypto Platforms Remain Exposed to Cloud Infrastructure Risks
The outage served as a reminder of how centralized cloud providers are for major crypto companies, even as the crypto world touts its decentralizing efforts.
Coinbase was one of the foremost crypto companies impacted, though not the only one during the AWS outage.
AWS eventually reported “early signs of recovery” after bringing additional cooling systems online. Some EC2 instances and EBS volumes, however, would be affected for a while until they have been fully restored, the company stated.
Source: https://www.cryptoninjas.net/news/coinbase-hit-by-aws-outage-as-us-east-1-failure-triggers-major-crypto-trading-disruptions/
