Coinbase cut 700 jobs on Monday, lost $394 million on Thursday, and went dark on Friday because a data centre overheated

"The outage, which Coinbase attributed to a thermal failure at an Amazon Web Services facility in Northern Virginia, suspended all trading, transfers, and core exchange functions from approximately 9 a.m. Singapore time on Friday until around 4 p.m. The company's retail-facing app also experienced degraded performance. Coinbase said the issue originated in a single AWS availability zone, use1-az4, in the US-EAST-1 region, but that failures spread across multiple zones, overwhelming the resilience mechanisms designed to handle a single-zone loss."

"AWS's US-EAST-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, is the oldest and most heavily used of Amazon's cloud regions. It is the default region for many AWS customers and hosts a disproportionate share of the internet's infrastructure. When it fails, the consequences extend far beyond any single customer."

"The overheating affected not only Coinbase but also CME Group and FanDuel, according to reports. AWS said temperatures rose inside a single data centre, causing power-related disruptions to EC2 instances and EBS storage volumes. The cooling system capacity took longer than expected to restore."

"Denmark has paused grid connections for new data centres as AI infrastructure overwhelms the country's power grid, and the thermal failure in Virginia illustrates the same underlying problem from the opposite direction: data centres generate enormous amounts of heat, and"

Coinbase suspended all trading, transfers, and core exchange functions for about seven hours after an AWS data centre overheated in Northern Virginia. The outage began around 9 a.m. Singapore time on Friday and lasted until about 4 p.m. During the same period, the retail-facing app experienced degraded performance. Coinbase attributed the problem to a thermal failure at an Amazon Web Services facility in the US-EAST-1 region, originating in a single availability zone, use1-az4. Failures then spread across multiple zones, overwhelming resilience mechanisms intended to handle a single-zone loss. Similar impacts were reported for other companies, including CME Group and FanDuel, as AWS temperatures rose inside a data centre and cooling capacity took longer than expected to recover.

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