Today’s AWS outages caused issues for Coinbase, leading to persistent outages across its advanced trading platform and other critical functions. The team has not yet declared the issue over.
Although Base aims for decentralization, these issues reveal some key weaknesses in Coinbase’s centralization. All of Base’s major non-stable tokens have lost value since the difficulty began.
AWS Outages Hit Coinbase
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is down this morning, wreaking havoc on websites all over the Internet. This has highlighted the need for decentralized online infrastructure, which apparently makes a great argument for crypto. However, Coinbase is not benefiting from this, as AWS outages disrupt some of its systems:
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Specifically, Coinbase Advanced, the exchange’s premium trading platform, has been experiencing intermittent issues due to the AWS issue. These outages have been going on for over two hours, but the team has not officially declared the issue resolved.
A look at the Coinbase status page claims that Advanced is working normally, but other major functions are still down. Since engineers have not ruled out additional outages on this particular platform, these issues could persist for some time.
Could decentralization solve this problem?
After Coinbase announced the outages, the community response was somewhat stinging. Although Base, the exchange’s blockchain, is apparently meant to be decentralized, its services are not load balanced across multiple cloud providers and its servers are geographically located.
Since the Coinbase outages began, all of Base’s major non-stable assets have lost value. To be clear, most of these price drops are pretty minor. Synthetix fell the most, which is unfortunate after recent setbacks, but it is only down 3.5% in the last hour. No base token suffered a real crash.
Still, given that Coinbase has ambitious plans to expand its services and compete with Binance, these outages seem like a setback. Competitors like Binance and Kraken would operate as usual. All things considered, the problem could be much worse, but AWS nonetheless exposed a real vulnerability for Coinbase.
If the exchange wants to avoid future setbacks, it should work to decentralize its servers and hosting services to better align with crypto’s core values.
