Coinbase users locked out as outage stretches past five hours

Coinbase has been inaccessible for over five hours, citing cloud service problems. The trading and brokerage platform announced an unexpected outage, leading to liquidations and losses for users with open positions.

Coinbase reported degraded performance, with its main site also going out at one point. According to the platform, the problems were due to overheating in one of its AWS cloud facilities. 

Coinbase experienced service disruptions due to increased temperatures in the affected Availability Zone (use1-az4) in the AWS US-EAST-1 Region.

We will begin the process to re-enable trading on our markets shortly. All markets would be placed in “Cancel Only” mode before we…

— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) May 8, 2026

Users reported some orders were partially filled, or positions were liquidated without access to closing or selling. Later, the exchange managed to allow limited usage mode with ‘Cancel Only’ orders.

As an immediate response, BTC fell to $79,333.53, following $366.83K in liquidations for the past hour, and $823.78K in the past four hours. Later, BTC resumed its rally as other markets took over during their most active hours.

Coinbase lost over 35% of its trading volume in the past day, with $1.2B in total activity. BTC is heavily affected, as it makes up over a third of volumes on Coinbase.

When will Coinbase reopen?  

Coinbase went through a period of degraded performance for over five hours. The latest update suggested trading may come back soon, with limited features at first.

“We will begin the process to re-enable trading on our markets shortly. All markets would be placed in “Cancel Only” mode before we move to re-enable trading,” announced Coinbase on its status page.

During the outage, BTC trading stalled and users reported price disparities compared to other centralized exchanges. The recovery may take longer, as it depends on external factors. The delays also happened during a relatively volatile day for BTC, when the leading coin dipped below $80,000 once again. 

Coinbase is still the biggest US exchange, but has shown the risks of centralization and relying on external infrastructure. For now, AWS has not reported outages, but the problem revealed Coinbase may be reliant on a single physical destination for servers. The hard dependence of Coinbase on Amazon’s cloud service is seen as a major fault point, undermining the decentralized nature of crypto.

Coinbase pressured by lowered crypto sentiment

BTC trading on Coinbase has shown a lowered sentiment from US-based users. Since the end of April, BTC has mostly traded at a discount, with rare days of the typical Coinbase premium. As Cryptopolitan reported, the lowered sentiment coincided with a $394M net loss and missed earnings targets.

The generally slower crypto market may also be a factor behind the recent Coinbase layoffs. The co-founder and CEO of Coinbase sent out a message explaining the rationale behind the 14% layoffs. 

According to Armstrong, the layoffs were the results of a restructuring where fewer managers and higher AI usage made teams more agile. Armstrong also suggested some of the latest Coinbase code has been shipped by non-technical teams. 

Coinbase has turned into a hub for multiple activities, including institutional custody. However, previous data leak problems, frozen accounts, and lost access to funds have undermined trust in the platform. 

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