AWS outage hits Coinbase after Virginia data centre issue

Amazon Web Services is working to restore normal operations at a major data centre in Northern Virginia after an overheating incident disrupted multiple cloud services and impacted platforms including Coinbase.

The cloud computing giant said Thursday that it had made “incremental progress” in restoring cooling systems at the affected facility, though recovery efforts have taken longer than expected. AWS also revealed that a related power loss damaged some hardware, raising the risk of continued service disruptions for customers relying on the impacted infrastructure, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.

The incident occurred inside one of AWS’s Northern Virginia Availability Zones — a critical part of the company’s global cloud network. Availability Zones consist of one or more connected data centres designed to operate independently while supporting high-demand internet services worldwide.

To reduce further disruption, AWS said it redirected traffic away from the affected zone for most services. Even so, customers continued reporting outages, delays and degraded performance across platforms connected to the infrastructure.

Among the companies affected was cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase
, which warned users they could experience slower performance because of the AWS issue. The company emphasized that customer funds remained safe despite the disruption.

The outage once again highlights how heavily the modern internet depends on a small number of cloud providers. AWS powers massive portions of the global digital economy, supporting everything from streaming services and financial platforms to government systems and AI applications.

Northern Virginia, where the incident occurred, is considered one of the world’s most important internet infrastructure hubs. The region hosts a dense concentration of data centres and handles a significant share of global web traffic, making any disruption there especially noticeable.

AWS has not yet disclosed what caused the cooling failure or how many customers were directly affected. However, the incident is likely to renew concerns about the resilience of hyperscale cloud infrastructure as businesses increasingly centralize operations on a handful of dominant platforms.

The disruption also serves as a reminder that even the world’s largest cloud providers remain vulnerable to physical infrastructure failures, including cooling, power and hardware-related problems that can quickly cascade across digital services used by millions.

News.Az 

By Aysel Mammadzada