Today’s AWS outages have caused problems for Coinbase, bringing persistent outages to its Advanced trading platform and other core functions. The team hasn’t declared the problem over yet.
Although Base aims for decentralization, these issues reveal some key weak points in Coinbase’s centralization. All leading non-stablecoin tokens on Base have declined in value since the difficulties began.
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:
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.
Ongoing Coinbase Outages. Source: Coinbase
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.
