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AWS / Coinbase. / Kafka / infrastructure / AI

Coinbase thought it could failover. It didn't count on bug in its Amazon MSK deployment.

Crypto exchange insists "we had an appropriate RF to survive a zone outage" as an AWS incident knocks it down, again.

Phillip de Wet
By  Phillip de Wet
Updated / Published 4 min read
Coinbase thought it could failover. It didn't count on bug in its Amazon MSK deployment.
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash

The timing was rather unfortunate. Just days after CEO Brian Armstrong spoke of non-technical teams "shipping production code", Coinbase went down, with major disruptions to trade for some five hours.

But it was neither vibe-coded foundations nor entirely an incident in a single availability zone (AZ) in AWS's most storied region, US-EAST-1, that took Coinbase offline for hours – even though the trouble started in an AWS data centre. Rather, it was a perfect storm of issues.

Among them: Coinbase failed to fail over smoothly because of a bug in its deployment of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, better known as AWS MSK, Coinbase's head of platform, Rob Witoff, told The Stack this week.

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  • Phillip de Wet

    Phillip de Wet

    Phillip de Wet started in journalism as an honest B2B IT-sector reporter before straying into business, politics, and international affairs. He is currently in recovery, studying AI while writing about everything from hardware to infosec policy.

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