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AWS Overheating Halts Coinbase, Delays CME Access

5/9/2026

27 5 Full Breakdown

Summary

AWS Overheats

AWS reported overheating in its US-East-1 zone use1-az4 in Virginia on May 7, causing an outage.
The heat caused power loss and latency for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, prompting AWS to shift traffic, add cooling, and warn that services may stay impaired.
Coinbase halted trading and delayed Solana and ALEO transfers, then re-enabled all markets, saying funds were safe.
CME Group faced login delays on CME Direct but restored access.

Summary

AWS Outage

On May 7, the AWS Dashboard and status page timed out for users in the US-EAST-1 region.
US-EAST-1, dubbed AWS’s “problem child,” previously failed in 2021 and October 2025.
Amazon added extra cooling and partially restored racks by 05:11 UTC on May 8.
Clients were urged to shift workloads to other US-EAST-1 zones, with longer provisioning expected, reviving concerns about temperature-related design weaknesses.

History

Historical Context

Since its launch, AWS’s US-East-1 region has repeatedly faltered—an EBS connectivity glitch in April 2011, a storm-driven outage in June 2012, and a 7.5 % EC2 loss in August 2019. The May 7 2024 overheating that slowed Coinbase, CME Group and others echoes this pattern, driving industry regulators to demand stronger thermal safeguards for data-center resilience.

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AWS Overheats

AWS reported overheating in its US-East-1 zone use1-az4 in Virginia on May 7, causing an outage.
The heat caused power loss and latency for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, prompting AWS to shift traffic, add cooling, and warn that services may stay impaired.
Coinbase halted trading and delayed Solana and ALEO transfers, then re-enabled all markets, saying funds were safe.
CME Group faced login delays on CME Direct but restored access.

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