On May 7, 2026, Coinbase suffered a nearly 10-hour global trading outage triggered by a regional AWS disruption. The root cause was that Coinbase's matching engine ran in a single AWS Cluster Placement Group (a single availability zone) with no automated cross-zone failover. Recovery required an emergency code change and manual quorum restoration. The author criticizes this as amateurish for a $40B company processing $5.2 trillion annually, drawing an unfavorable comparison to Uber's multi-region failover drills from a decade earlier. The piece also notes that Coinbase had previously suffered a similar AWS-related outage in October 2025 and pledged to review its regional deployment strategy — a review that apparently failed to address this single-zone dependency.
