AWS data center outage hits trading on Fanduel, Coinbase — recovery to take hours

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a prominent cloud services provider, began experiencing significant operational challenges on Thursday, leading to disruptions in trading for platforms such as Coinbase and FanDuel. As of Friday morning, AWS indicated that full recovery would take several hours, with the latest update shared at 9:51 a.m. ET. The source of the outage was linked to overheating issues at a data center located in the US-East-1 region, specifically in northern Virginia. AWS clarified that the problems were confined to a single Availability Zone within this region. In their update, the company stated, "We are actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected hardware in the impacted zone." AWS is focused on resolving the impairments affecting EC2 instances, which are crucial for virtual server capacity. The AWS health dashboard initially reported the issue at 8:25 p.m. ET on Thursday, indicating that they were investigating the instance impairments. Meanwhile, FanDuel, the sports-betting application, acknowledged the situation on X (formerly Twitter) at 9:00 p.m. ET Thursday, stating that they were aware of the technical difficulties preventing user access. By 11:00 p.m. ET, FanDuel confirmed the disruption was related to the AWS outage, with users expressing frustration over lost bets and issues with cashing out. Coinbase also addressed the outage on Friday, noting that failures across multiple AWS zones led to a prolonged disruption of their core trading services. Fortunately, they reported that the primary issue has since been resolved. Notably, AWS holds approximately one-third of the cloud infrastructure market, serving millions of businesses worldwide.