Just hours after Coinbase announced its 2026 Q1 results, its services experienced a massive outage leaving users confused and investors concerned. After over six hours of service disruptions, Coinbase confirmed on Friday that all services had been restored. Despite Coinbase’s claims, users have continued to complain about experiencing service lags and snags in being able to fetch their account details.
An issue in Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused the Coinbase outage. One of AWS’s data centre’s located in Northern Virginia experienced increased temperatures. This hot air within the data centre impacted AWS’ cloud services leaving them in a complete disarray.
In the backdrop of these AWS disruptions, Coinbase users started to face hurdles in being able to buy and sell crypto assets by around 8:00 PM ET (4:00 AM GST). The exchange acknowledged that its systems had started to flag high error rates across services.
“Coinbase systems are designed to be resilient to a single zone outage, and are designed to recover quickly if this happens. In this case, we observed failures impacting multiple AWS zones, which caused an extended outage of core trading services,” the exchange said.
Coinbase had been maintaining that user funds were safe during the outage. AWS Support was also addressing the outage on X at the time, and had acknowledged that the thermal issue only affected a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
At around 1:40 AM ET (9:38 AM GST) on Friday, the AWS Support team said they were working on restoring temperatures to normal levels but warned that some AWS services could continue to see latencies and risen error rates.
While Coinbase has claimed that the primary issue impacting its services has been “fully resolved”, its users have been posting about the issues they continue to face. While some say their DEX balances are showing $0, the others are experiencing roadblocks in making deposits on the Coinbase accounts. The exchange is responding to these concerns inviting users to send private messages to Coinbase Support to initiate a review of this account.
The exchange’s community also pointed out that Coinbase was not prompt enough to address the outage and left its users stressed for the initial hours.
This week has turned out to be quite eventful for Coinbase. The company announced a 14 percent staff layoff earlier this week announcing a strategic pivot to AI-powered operations. Just hours before the outage, Coinbase reported a $394 million net loss in Q1 2026 with its total revenue locking in at $1.4 billion having dipped by 21 percent quarter-over-quarter.
