Brief Incident Post Mortem: January 6–7, 2021

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This is a short placeholder blog and will be replaced with a full post-mortem and disclosure of what happened yesterday.

From 15:15 to 15:45 UTC on Tuesday, January 6th 2021, and again from 15:32 to 20:36 UTC yesterday, January 7th, 2021, the API that powers coinbase.com and our mobile applications experienced instability for our customers globally. This instability ranged from periods of full outage to elevated error rates for customers across both our web and mobile applications. At 20:36 UTC, full service was restored and all systems began operating normally.

This issue only affected customers’ ability to access Coinbase and Coinbase Pro UIs, and did not impact trading via our exchange APIs or the health of the underlying markets.

API error rate (%) during this period (all times in PST)

We have identified the problem and have successfully implemented a mitigation which allowed us to restore full service. In parallel with the publication of this post, our internal teams are running a full post-mortem in order to understand how this occurred, and how we can prevent it from happening again. We will be publishing a full post-mortem with details on our learnings and next steps.

We deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this unavailability caused and remain committed to making Coinbase the easiest and most trusted place to buy, sell, and manage your cryptocurrency.

If you’re interested in working on challenging availability problems and building the future of the cryptoeconomy, come join us.

Brief Incident Post Mortem: January 6–7, 2021 was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.