Coinbase experienced a service disruption last night attributed to “increased temperatures” in the AWS Health Dashboard. The crypto platform pointed to regional failure “in the AWS US-EAST-1 Region” – which is US East (N. Virginia) region. The outage, now resolved, came a day after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong predicted a future where he said that non-technical people will be able to write code thanks to AI agents. “There will be a point, I think, in the future, where nontechnical people will be able to write code, AI agents will be able to review it and check it for security, [and] improve the quality of it. And actually, in certain situations, have it go to production, but that’s not yet the case today,” he said during an earnings call on May 8. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made similar comments recently when he announced to cut nearly 14% of the company’s workforce. In a May 5 email to Coinbase staff informing them about job cuts, he wrote that “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.” “All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core,” he said in the letter earlier this week.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong blames AWS for outage

In an X post, Brian Armstrong said that the outage was caused due to “a room overheating in an AWS datacenter when multiple chillers failed”. “. We design our services to be redundant to downtime in any one AWS Availability Zone (AZ), and most of our systems worked this way last night, but not all,” he stated in the post.Here’s what he wrote:“We experienced an outage at Coinbase last night, which is never acceptable. The root cause was a room overheating in an AWS datacenter when multiple chillers failed. We design our services to be redundant to downtime in any one AWS Availability Zone (AZ), and most of our systems worked this way last night, but not all.Our centralized exchange did not. Exchanges have unique architectures that optimize for latency and co-location of clients. It is possible to make exchanges resistant to AZ failures, but this can introduce latency delays that are not desirable along with breaking customer co-location. Given this incident, we’ll revisit these tradeoffs to ensure we’re giving you the best possible venue to trade. At a minimum, the duration of an outage should be able to be reduced considerably when an AZ move is needed.Thank you to the AWS and Coinbase teams for working through the night to mitigate the issue. We’ll share the detailed technical summary once it’s ready.”