Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage at one of its northern Virginia data centre zones on Thursday, causing disruptions for customers including cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and derivatives marketplace CME Group.
AWS said the problem started after temperatures rose inside a single data centre, blaming a cooling system failure while explaining that engineers brought extra cooling capacity online as recovery work continued.
The outage affected services in one Availability Zone, which is a group of connected data centres designed to operate separately within an AWS region. AWS said it redirected traffic away from the affected zone for most services to reduce disruption.
Later in the day, recovery was taking longer than expected because more cooling capacity was still needed before remaining systems could safely return online. AWS further added that it did not yet have a timeline for full recovery.
Coinbase confirmed its trading platform issues were directly linked to the AWS outage. Users reported problems accessing services and delays during trading, although the company later said all markets had been restored and trading resumed normally.
Meanwhile, CME Group reported login and latency problems on its CME Direct trading platform. In a notice to users, the exchange said it had completed “essential maintenance work” and confirmed customers could log back in. The company did not explain the cause of the disruption.
Neither AWS nor CME immediately responded to requests for additional comment outside normal business hours.
The incident again exposed how heavily large financial platforms depend on cloud providers such as AWS. Even a problem in a single data centre zone can spread quickly across trading services, apps and online platforms used worldwide.
AWS has faced similar problems before. In October last year, a major outage disrupted thousands of websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit. That disruption became one of the largest internet outages in recent years.
A month later, CME Group experienced another major interruption after cooling systems failed at a data centre operated by CyrusOne in the Chicago area. Trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies stopped for several hours.
The latest outage also points to stress on data centres as companies expand artificial intelligence systems and use more high-density servers, which generate far more heat and demand stronger cooling systems.
AWS has advised customers to spread workloads across multiple Availability Zones and regions to reduce the risk of large-scale disruptions when outages happen.
