[Coinbase Reviews May Outage Incident: AWS Cascade Failure Exposes Architectural Risks] Odaily Planet Daily News - Coinbase has released a review report on the large-scale service outage that occurred on May 7, 2026. The outage lasted approximately 8 hours, with full recovery taking about 12 hours. During this period, trading, deposits, withdrawals, and most core services were either unavailable or severely degraded. Coinbase stated that the root cause of the outage was the simultaneous failure of multiple cooling units in the cooling system of an AWS us-east-1 region availability zone (use1-az4) data center. This triggered thermal protection shutdowns for server racks, leading to the offline status of EC2 instances and EBS volumes, which subsequently impacted multiple internet services. During the recovery process, Coinbase's trading matching engine lost quorum due to the cluster architecture being deployed in a single AWS data center, as most nodes became unavailable. Emergency code adjustments and the rebuilding of new node groups were required to restore operations, with market trading gradually restarted during the recovery process. Additionally, AWS-managed Kafka (MSK) services experienced control plane failures, preventing automatic partition leader re-election. This further disrupted pricing, fees, and parts of settlement and data flow systems, expanding the overall impact. After collaborating with AWS engineering teams to manually migrate partitions, the system gradually returned to normal. Coinbase acknowledged that this incident exposed deficiencies in its cross-availability zone automatic failover capabilities and disaster recovery for managed middleware. The company plans to upgrade its cross-region hot standby architecture, strengthen regular failure drills, and migrate the Kafka system from dual availability zone deployment to a triple availability zone setup. Coinbase will also work with AWS to address root causes and implement improvements.