Is Coinbase down? How to tell, and what to do next

The fastest answer is the Coinbase status page on isuptime, which reads Coinbase's own feed every few minutes and says what it currently reports.

The more useful answer is that Coinbase publishes 174 separate components, which is one of the most granular status pages any large provider maintains. That granularity is the whole story: it exists because "Coinbase" is a website, a mobile app, a trading engine, an API, a developer platform, a set of bank and card rails, and a per-asset list of blockchain integrations — and those fail one at a time, for reasons that often have nothing to do with each other.

What Coinbase actually reports on

The components sit in groups, and it is worth knowing which group your problem lives in:

Scan the recent incident titles and the shape repeats: "Delayed Sends — Ethereum Network", "Delayed Receives — ARBETH", "Degraded Performance — Coinbase Payments", "Degraded Performance — CDP Wallets". Scoped incidents, because the failures are scoped.

The distinction that resolves most of these

A delayed send is usually not an outage. When a chain is congested, or a network upgrade is in flight, or gas is spiking, transactions sit in the mempool for a long time. Coinbase posts that as a per-asset incident because from your side it is indistinguishable from Coinbase being broken — your money left and has not arrived. But the fix is not on Coinbase's side and no amount of retrying helps.

This is the single most common reason people conclude Coinbase is down when it is not. Check which asset. If Ethereum sends are delayed and Bitcoin sends are fine, you are looking at a chain, not an exchange.

The other pattern: volatility is the load test

The failure mode Coinbase is famous for is not random. It arrives when the price moves hard, because that is when everybody opens the app at once, and the traffic spike is correlated with exactly the moment people most want to trade.

Two consequences worth internalising:

• The app and the API do not fail together. During surges the consumer surfaces are usually the first to degrade while the trading API keeps taking orders. If you have both paths, one of them is probably still working.
• Being down and being slow are different problems with the same feeling. A page that eventually loads after twenty seconds is not an outage by any status-page vocabulary, and it is a total outage from where you are sitting during a fast move.

Five failures that impersonate a Coinbase outage

These account for most of the times the status page is green and you are still stuck.

1. Account-level holds. Verification lapses, regional restrictions, security reviews and withdrawal holds all produce hard failures that are specific to your account. Nothing appears on a status page, because from Coinbase's side the system is working exactly as designed.

2. The payment rail, not the exchange. A card decline is your issuer's decision. An ACH or SEPA transfer runs on banking-hours schedules that have nothing to do with crypto markets being open all night. "My deposit has not landed" is very often a banking-calendar question.

3. The asset is not supported the way you assumed. Coinbase routinely posts network-support updates — an asset gaining or losing support for a particular network. Sending on the wrong network is an irreversible category of mistake, and it is not an outage.

4. Rate limits on the API. Trading APIs are aggressively rate limited, and a burst of orders or a polling loop that got tighter after a deploy produces errors that look exactly like a broken endpoint.

5. Regional and regulatory scoping. Products are not uniformly available. Derivatives, staking and some trading features differ by jurisdiction, and an unavailable product reads as a broken one.

Is it Coinbase, or is it just me?

A decision procedure that resolves this quickly:

1. Check the status page and find which component. "Bitcoin" being flagged and "Coinbase — Website" being flagged are different incidents with different remedies.
2. Try the other surface. If the app fails, try the website, or the reverse. A surge usually takes one before the other.
3. Ask whether it is one asset or all of them. One asset points at a chain; all of them point at Coinbase.
4. Ask whether it is one payment method or all of them. One method points at a bank or card processor.
5. Check whether anything else is broken. If several unrelated providers are reporting problems at the same moment, the common cause is more likely upstream — a cloud region or a CDN — than each of them independently having a bad day.

That last step is most of why isuptime reads 102 status pages on one schedule rather than one at a time. Shared timing across unrelated providers is real evidence of a common cause. It is never proof of one.

What a status page cannot tell you here

Every status page on this site is the provider's own account of itself, published by the provider, on the provider's timing. That is worth understanding in general, and it carries a specific weight on a financial platform: the gap between when something breaks and when an incident is declared is exactly the window in which people are trying to act on a price.

None of which makes the page dishonest. It makes it a lagging indicator with a real lag — which is a reason to check the specific component rather than the top-line dot, and a reason not to treat green as proof that your order went through. The record of what happened to your money is your account history, not a status page.

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Live Coinbase status on isuptime is read from Coinbase's own public feed on a fixed schedule and shows what Coinbase is currently reporting, with the timestamp of the check. It is not an independent test of whether Coinbase works for you, and it is not financial advice — here is exactly what it can and cannot tell you.