Coinbase: AWS Thermal Event Caused 8-Hour Trading Outage in…

Coinbase has published a detailed postmortem on the May 7 outage that knocked out trading, deposits, and withdrawals for approximately eight hours, with full recovery stretching to around 12 hours. The root cause: multiple cooling units failed simultaneously at an AWS us-east-1 availability zone, triggering server shutdowns due to overheating.

The postmortem reveals two compounding failures that delayed recovery — a matching engine locked to the failed availability zone, and a silent failure inside AWS's managed Kafka service that went undetected until it was already blocking restoration. Coinbase acknowledged the incident exposed meaningful gaps in its failover and disaster recovery architecture.

The remediation plan includes strengthening regional redundancy, expanding Kafka from two to three availability zones, and increasing resilience testing cadence. For a platform handling billions in daily volume, an 8-hour window of inaccessibility is a significant operational credibility event — the infrastructure upgrades will be the metric to watch.

Source: [A postmortem of our May 7, 2026 outage](https://www.coinbase.com/zh-cn/blog/a-postmortem-of-our-may-7-2026-outage)