AWS data center outage hits trading on FanDuel, Coinbase
An overheating failure in AWS’s US-East-1 Northern Virginia zone took down FanDuel and Coinbase trading overnight Thursday, with full recovery still lagging hours past initial estimates.
What Matters
- Root cause: overheating in a single Availability Zone within US-East-1, requiring new cooling capacity before hardware recovery can proceed.
- AWS first flagged instance impairments at 8:25 p.m. ET Thursday; by 3:29 p.m. ET Friday recovery was still hours away.
- Affected resource type is EC2 (virtual server capacity); impaired instances block dependent services from restoring automatically.
- FanDuel went fully dark for users; gamblers reported lost bets from inability to cash out during live events.
- Coinbase cited failures across multiple AWS zones causing an extended outage of core trading services; primary issue later marked resolved.
- AWS holds ~33% of the cloud infrastructure market, so single-region thermal failures propagate to millions of downstream services.
- Recovery pace described as “slower than we had previously anticipated,” signaling cooling remediation is the hard constraint, not software failover.
