Coinbase posted a concise post-mortem on Tuesday explaining the cause behind an approximately 50-minute, platform-wide outage that occurred last week.
The disruption, running from 12:37 PM ET to about 1:25 PM ET on July 14, knocked out retail and institutional trading, deposits and withdrawals, Coinbase Card debit transactions, onchain swaps on Coinbase’s Base and Solana DEX integrations, as well as some other Prime services, according to the post.
"Coinbase experienced a service disruption that affected transfers, card transactions, and onchain services across our retail, institutional, and developer platforms," the company wrote, noting the issue "was caused by an unintended misconfiguration of an important network component as a result of a routine configuration update."
More specifically, Coinbase planned for a routine and “low-risk” configuration change to a shared production Kubernetes cluster as part of a migration to a new service deployment model. However, there was a resource name collision that “was not detected by our pre-production checks” that caused a system-wide blockage, according to the post.
"This loss of network access impacted nearly all internal asynchronous workflows," Coinbase wrote. "Workflows are how Coinbase moves money: trades settle, transfers complete, and card transactions are authorized through them. When infrastructure services became unreachable, those workflows paused platform-wide."
