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Tech & Science
Amazon Web Services shut down a major data center in Virginia due to extreme heat, disrupting services including Coinbase.
Extreme heat forced Amazon Web Services to temporarily shut down one of its primary data centers in northern Virginia last Thursday, the company confirmed. Engineers had to restrict certain services and reroute customer traffic to other facilities, according to The Next Web, impacting several clients including cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, which experienced a prolonged outage of core trading functions.
The crisis showed no signs of resolution until Friday morning, with Amazon declining to provide a timeline for a fix. AWS stated in a release that teams were working intensively to add cooling capacity, which would allow damaged equipment in the affected zone to be restarted, as reported by Futurism.
Although the company announced the issue was resolved by 11:30 a.m. Friday, a persistent problem within the northern Virginia region continued to cause service disruptions for more than an additional hour.
Complete data center outages are extremely uncommon, while cooling-system-related problems are even rarer, Daniel Mioton, an energy infrastructure expert and partner at a law firm, told Reuters in a 2025 interview. Mioton noted that these centers are required to operate with a readiness rate exceeding 99.99% of the time, making any sudden stoppage exceptional.
The incident carries a significant irony amid growing criticism of the massive carbon footprint produced by data centers, especially with the rapid expansion of their construction to support the artificial intelligence boom. Data centers currently contribute about 0.5% of total global carbon emissions. A team of researchers at Cornell University found that if AI continues to grow at current rates, data centers could release between 24 and 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2030—equivalent to adding between 5 and 10 million cars to U.S. roads.
One controversial study has also suggested a link between data centers and rising temperatures in surrounding areas over long distances. This crisis highlights a clear dilemma: data centers that require enormous amounts of energy to operate now face the risk of shutting down due to the very heat they help increase on a planetary scale.
