AWS ‘Thermal Event’ Melts Down Coinbase and FanDuel in Massive Outage

• Some FanDuel bettors complained about not being able to cash out
• The gaming company said the issue appears to be the result of a broader AWS outage
• Coinbase acknowledged “core” trading functions were limited due to the outage

A major cooling failure at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Northern Virginia triggered a seven-hour blackout for FanDuel and Coinbase, leaving millions of bettors and crypto traders locked out of their accounts.

Just days after a major leadership shakeup, FanDuel was hit by a brutal AWS blackout late Thursday, leaving the industry leader scrambling to explain why users were frozen out of live games and cashing out.

That was followed up by an announcement that it was working with a service provider, presumably AWS, to “troubleshoot.”

At this time, the issue appears to be related to a broader global AWS outage. We understand how frustrating this can be and appreciate your patience while services are restored,” according to the latest post on the FanDuel customer support X account.

That post, which has 762 replies as of this writing, indicates customers were highly dissatisfied with some claiming they were offered cash outs prior to the AWS outages only to see those bets go down in flames.

While rival sportsbooks stayed live, FanDuel users were left in the dark—triggering a wave of fury and threats of legal action from bettors who were blocked from cashing out their winning tickets.

Coinbase Ensnared, Too

Coinbase, also dealing with an eventful week, was also affected by the AWS down time. On its X page, Coinbase Support noted it was affected by the AWS snafu.

“This primary issue is now fully resolved – thank you for your patience. If you have any outstanding questions about your account, please reach out to Coinbase Support, we’re ready to help,” according to a post on X.

Coinbase, the largest US-based cryptocurrency trading house, is a rising player in the prediction market industry. It offers event contracts through a partnership with Kalshi. The company didn’t mention its prediction market platform in discussing the AWS outage.

AWS Outage Largely Resolved

Northern Virginia is home to a significant population of data centers. Immediately following the ‘thermal event,’ AWS launched an emergency response to save its Northern Virginia infrastructure.

Power was restored to the first wave of servers by late evening, but a complex, controlled cooling phase slowed the recovery of the remaining hardware, dragging the process out much longer than engineers predicted.

“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,” AWS said in a statement. “Some customers will continue to see their affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes as impaired until we achieve full recovery.”

AWS is one the largest cloud computing infrastructure providers, controlling a third of that market in the US.