Amazon cloud outage disrupts Coinbase and CME trading systems at North Virginia data centre

Amazon's cloud unit reported an outage at one of its data center zones in northern Virginia on Thursday, while derivatives marketplace CME Group and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said there were issues with their trading platforms.

It was not immediately clear if the issues at AWS and CME were related. Coinbase, however, said problems with its platform were caused by the AWS outage.

AWS said its issue stemmed from increased temperatures within a single data center and it was observing early signs of recovery, as it was able to get additional cooling system capacity online.

As part of its recovery efforts, the cloud computing platform said it had shifted traffic away from the impacted Availability Zone for most services.

An "Availability Zone" comprises one or more connected physical data centers and are designed to operate independently within an AWS Region.

Coinbase said some of its users may experience degraded performance due to the AWS issue, though it added that customer funds remained safe.

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Coinbase said it was working to re-enable trading shortly.

In a status update on its website, CME, the world's largest derivatives marketplace, said it has completed essential maintenance work and users are now able to log in to its CME Direct trading platform. It did not identify the cause of the technical and latency issues.

Both CME and AWS did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.

The latest disruption comes after AWS was hit by a major outage in October last year that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web's most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit.

That was the largest internet disruption since the CrowdStrike malfunction in 2024 hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.

In the following month, global futures markets were disrupted for several hours after CME Group suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

CME at the time blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centers run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers including CME.

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