Coinbase Cuts 700 Jobs, Reports $394 Million Quarterly Loss, and Suffers Seven-Hour AWS Outage in Same Week

Coinbase eliminated 700 positions (14% of its workforce) on Monday, reported a $394 million net loss on Thursday (revenue fell 31% YoY to $1.41 billion), and went offline for seven hours on Friday when an AWS data center in Virginia overheated. CEO Brian Armstrong framed the layoffs as an AI-driven restructuring, introducing a "no pure managers" policy expected to save $120–150 million annually. The AWS outage originated in a single availability zone but spread across multiple zones, overwhelming resilience mechanisms. Armstrong had told employees AI could do weeks of work in days—then the exchange went dark because of a cooling failure in a facility the company doesn't own.