Business
Coinbase, Robinhood down as Amazon outage briefly cripples the internet
A widespread internet outage continues to affect the crypto exchange Coinbase and the online brokerage Robinhood on Monday, among other websites like Snapchat and Hulu. The brief pause in both platforms’ services came after Amazon’s cloud computing arm reported that its services were down in northern Virginia. “We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues,” wrote Amazon Web Services (AWS) late Monday morning.
Coinbase acknowledged the impact of the AWS outage on its services. “Many online services, including Coinbase, experienced issues,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. “Coinbase services have recovered. Some older asset transfer requests are still pending, which we are investigating.”
“Services are impacted due to issues at AWS, one of our third party vendors,” said Robinhood, which derives a substantial portion of its revenue from crypto trading, in a post on X. “We’re working to resolve this ASAP.” It is unclear which Robinhood services are still impacted.
Spokespeople for Robinhood and AWS did not respond to requests for further comment. Thousands of users reported that Coinbase and Robinhood were down on Monday, according to the website Downdetector.
Crypto developers aim to create a decentralized internet that isn’t reliant on one party in the spirit of Bitcoin, the first blockchain developed by the pseudonymous figure Satoshi Nakamoto. Still, Monday’s outage illustrates that portions of the crypto industry still depend on large tech providers like Amazon. And, while there have been attempts to create decentralized cloud computing services like Arweave to compete with centralized incumbents, they haven’t taken off.
Cloud computing downtime
In April, another bout of AWS malfunctions briefly crippled the exchanges Binance and Kucoin. Binance briefly paused customer withdrawals amid the disruption.
While AWS said Monday that services from its data center in Virginia are still “degraded,” it said in a running log of status updates that it was “seeing early signs of recovery.”
Despite the outage, stocks for Amazon, Coinbase, and Robinhood were all up Monday morning. As of publication, Amazon’s shares rose 1% since markets opened, Coinbase was up almost 5%, and Robinhood jumped more than 6%.
