Coinbase’s single‑zone design caused a 10‑hour outage – a cautionary tale for low‑latency systems
Coinbase’s matching engine ran in a single AWS availability zone, so when that zone failed the whole exchange went down for ten hours. The postmortem reveals no automated cross‑zone failover and explains why the latency‑critical design blocked resilience. Teams building low‑latency services must balance performance with robust zone‑level redundancy.