AWS outage hits Coinbase after Virginia data centre issue

Amazon Web Services is working to restore normal operations after a cooling system failure at a major data centre in Northern Virginia disrupted cloud services and affected platforms including Coinbase.

The cloud computing giant said it had made “incremental progress” in restoring cooling systems at the affected facility, though recovery efforts are ongoing and have taken longer than expected. The incident occurred in one of AWS’s US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, a critical part of its global cloud infrastructure, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.

AWS clarified that servers automatically shut down when temperatures exceeded safe operating thresholds in order to protect hardware integrity. As a result, some instances and storage volumes were described as “impaired,” rather than damaged, reflecting a protective system response rather than physical destruction of equipment.

To mitigate disruption, AWS redirected traffic away from the affected zone for most services. However, users still reported outages, delays, and degraded performance across multiple platforms relying on the infrastructure.

Among the impacted services was cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which warned users about potential performance slowdowns during the disruption. The company stressed that customer funds remained secure despite service interruptions.

The affected region in Northern Virginia is one of the most important internet infrastructure hubs globally, hosting a dense network of data centres that support a large share of global digital traffic. Any disruption in the area can have widespread effects across financial services, streaming platforms, AI systems, and enterprise tools.

AWS has not yet publicly detailed the root cause of the cooling failure or the total number of affected customers. However, the incident highlights ongoing concerns about the resilience of hyperscale cloud infrastructure, where a small number of providers underpin a significant portion of global internet services.

The disruption also underscores the vulnerability of even the most advanced data centres to physical infrastructure challenges such as cooling and power management, which can quickly cascade into broader service interruptions across multiple industries.

News.Az 

By Aysel Mammadzada