Reliability

When One Data Center Room Got Hot: AWS US-EAST-1, Coinbase, and the DR Drill That Was Not

On May 7, 2026, cooling failed in a single hall of one US-EAST-1 data center. Coinbase, FanDuel, and CME Group went down for hours, and Coinbase publicly confirmed their backup systems did not work as expected. Here is what happened, the multi-AZ checklist that would have caught it, and the AWS Fault Injection Simulator commands to run the drill before the next thermal event.