AWS Outages Rock Crypto: Coinbase Advanced & Base Tokens Face Disruptions
Cloud chaos strikes again—AWS outages send shockwaves through crypto markets as Coinbase Advanced and Base tokens stumble. Just when you thought centralized infrastructure couldn't bite harder, web3's dirty little secret rears its head.
When the cloud sneezes, crypto catches pneumonia. Today's AWS failure exposes the ironic fragility of decentralized finance's reliance on centralized tech stacks. Traders left staring at spinning loaders while the 'unstoppable' future of finance grinds to a halt.
Bonus jab: At least the flash crashes will be organic this time—no need for algorithmic manipulation when AWS does the job for free.
AWS Outages Strike Coinbase
AWS (Amazon Web Services) has been down this morning, wreaking havoc on websites all across the internet. This has highlighted the need for decentralized online infrastructure, ostensibly making a great case for crypto. However, Coinbase isn’t benefitting, as the AWS outages are disrupting some of its systems:
We are currently experiencing service disruptions on Coinbase Advanced trading.
Our team is actively investigating and working to restore service, which is being impacted by the ongoing AWS outage. We apologize for the interruption.
Specifically, Coinbase Advanced, the exchange’s premium trading platform, has experienced intermittent issues due to the AWS problem. These outages have been going on for over two hours, yet the team hasn’t officially declared the problem resolved.
A look at Coinbase’s status page claims that Advanced is working normally, but other Core functions are still on the fritz. Considering that engineers haven’t ruled out additional outages on this particular platform, these problems might persist for a while.
Could Decentralization Fix This?
After Coinbase announced the outages, the community response has been somewhat prickly. Although Base, the exchange’s blockchain, is ostensibly supposed to be decentralized, its services load isn’t balanced across multiple cloud vendors, and its servers are localized geographically.
Since Coinbase’s outages began, all leading non-stablecoin assets on Base have depreciated in value. To be clear, most of these price drops are pretty minor. Synthetix declined the most, which is unfortunate after recent setbacks, but it only fell 3.5% in the last hour. No Base tokens have suffered a full-blown crash.
Still, considering that Coinbase has ambitious plans to expand services and compete with Binance, these outages seem like a setback. Competitors like Binance and Kraken are reportedly functioning as usual. All things considered, the problem could be a lot worse, but AWS nonetheless exposed a real vulnerability for Coinbase.
If the exchange wishes to avoid future setbacks, it should work to decentralize its servers and hosting services to better align with crypto’s CORE values.
