After limiting markets and gradually reopening them due to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has resumed trading across its exchange, website, and mobile applications.
Coinbase systems detected significant error rates across many services at about 8:00 pm ET on Thursday, which led to the start of the service downtime. According to AWS, the data center in Northern Virginia had infrastructure issues due to the high temperatures, which caused them to redirect traffic away from the impacted Availability Zone.
According to Coinbase public updates, the exchange first put markets in cancel-only mode during the downtime, then went through auction mode, and then enabled trading again. By switching to “cancel-only,” customers may remove already-placed orders but cannot initiate any new transactions. Afterwards, Coinbase Support said that all Coinbase Exchange markets were back up and running at 7:48 am UTC. At 9:25 am UTC, coinbase.com and the iOS and Android applications followed suit.
Cloud Infrastructure Issues
The event highlighted how disruptions at major cloud providers may impact users’ access to digital asset platforms and momentarily restricted their ability to trade on one of the biggest US crypto exchanges.
In a further update, Coinbase said that the interruption started at around 8:00 pm ET on May 7, when the company’s systems detected elevated error rates across several services. The issues were allegedly caused by AWS outages in Availability Zone use1-az4 in the US-EAST-1 area, a distinct cluster of data centers inside AWS’s Northern Virginia cloud area, according to the exchange.
According to the business, its systems can endure and swiftly recover from an outage in a single AWS Availability Zone. But Coinbase claimed it saw problems impacting many AWS zones, or more than one cluster of data centers, which led to a protracted suspension of essential trading services.