Hot air at AWS causes Coinbase outage
Coinbase stopped working for over seven hours on Thursday after hot air in an Amazon data center threw its cloud services into disarray. The exchanges users found themselves unable to buy or sell crypto, while order book prices displayed hundreds of dollars larger than rival exchanges Binance and Hyperliquid. The cause? Coinbase blames “increased temperatures in the affected AWS service.” Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is one of the largest providers of cloud infrastructure that keeps much of the internet ticking over, claims to have suffered from a “thermal event” in one of its data centers in Northern Virginia. The increase in temperature apparently affected its cloud hosting hardware, leading to a loss of power. AWS quickly got to work on a solution, and as of this morning said it was “actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected racks in a controlled and safe manner.” Amazon notes that its data centers rely on evaporation cooling, a system that involves filters in its air conditioning units being “dampened” with water, cooling any hot air that comes in and evaporating the water in the process. Microsoft uses a similar system to Amazons AWS cooling methods. Whatever the fix was