On May 8, a cooling unit failure in an AWS data center serving Northern Virginia led to overheating in server racks, forcing an automatic shutdown of affected hardware. The facility’s backup systems failed to maintain optimal temperatures, resulting in service interruptions.

The cooling incident directly impacted Coinbase’s trading engine and crypto wallet functionality, causing roughly 30 minutes of downtime before AWS engineers restored cooling and rebooted affected instances. Although the outage was brief, it underscores concerns over AWS’s ability to guarantee uninterrupted service for mission-critical clients.