On May 8, 2026, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced operational issues due to overheating at a data center in its main US-East-1 region located in northern Virginia, impacting trading on major platforms such as Coinbase and FanDuel [1]. The outage was confined to a single Availability Zone within the region, and AWS reported that full recovery was still expected to take several hours as of their latest update at 9:51 a.m. ET on Friday [1]. AWS 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' [1].
The AWS health dashboard first noted the issue at 8:25 p.m. ET on Thursday, indicating that they were 'investigating instance impairments' related to EC2 instances, which provide virtual server capacity [1]. At 9:00 p.m. ET Thursday, FanDuel acknowledged technical difficulties on X, later attributing the problem to the broader AWS outage. Users reported being unable to access the platform and complained about lost bets due to the inability to cash out [1].
Coinbase also reported on X that failures in multiple AWS zones led to an extended outage of its core trading services. However, Coinbase stated that the primary issue had been fully resolved as of Friday [1]. AWS is a major provider in the cloud infrastructure market, serving millions of companies and accounting for about a third of the market share [1].
The outage had significant implications for the affected platforms, disrupting trading activities and causing user frustration. AWS's ongoing recovery efforts and the eventual resolution of the primary issues at Coinbase suggest that services are gradually returning to normal, though some impacts may persist until full recovery is achieved [1].
CONCLUSION
The AWS data center outage caused major disruptions for trading platforms like FanDuel and Coinbase, highlighting the critical dependence on cloud infrastructure. While Coinbase has resolved its primary issues, AWS continues to work towards full recovery, with market impact considered high due to the scale and reach of the affected services.