Coinbase ‘I was fired’ memes revive on X amid Base outage

A blue-check account on X falsely claimed to be a freshly fired Coinbase product manager, earning nearly 200,000 views within hours. The meme fit perfectly into crypto investors’ predispositions yesterday with irresistible confirmation bias.

Yesterday, bitcoin and ether hit 52-week lows. Base, Coinbase’s blockchain, was down for roughly two hours. Everything was going down.

The account jokingly explained that Coinbase fired Ravi Riley as “a non-technical PM on the Base sequencer team and my first PR got merged to prod at noon.” Multiple trackers confirmed the roughly two-hour outage, even though it was not caused by Riley, who was never a Coinbase employee.

The memetic implication was that a new hire had crashed Base and then was marched out.

It is, after all, too easy to dunk on Coinbase. The company is the largest publicly traded crypto company and probably has the largest US customer base on social media.

Yesterday’s meme traces its origin to at least May 5.

Early in the morning on that day, founder Brian Armstrong cut 700 workers, or roughly 14% of his staff. He revoked access on the spot, before most employees started work in the morning, “Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information.”

Within two days, the Coinbase website went down altogether. Although the headcount reduction was probably unrelated to that outage, it didn’t matter for many critics on social media.

Attempting to blame the layoffs on something positive, Armstrong framed the cuts as an AI-driven rebuild. Tens of millions of dollars in restructuring charges would somehow improve the business with a nebulous benefit of AI.

I was fired from Coinbase today without warning. pic.twitter.com/n0ZoQxnBRc

Layoffs, then a service outage. Armstrong’s memo had spawned a meme. “Today I was fired from Coinbase” became an instant hit.

The most popular variants claimed absurd job accomplishments, especially Coinbase operations that crypto traders hated: issuing 1099s, freezing accounts, implementing the 4H chart, and website cacheing.

As with any meme on social media, people remake it in endless variations to make Coinbase the punchline of layoffs that never literally happened as a way to make fun of Coinbase’s shortcomings.

Yesterday, Base resumed normal block production within about two hours. Block production stalled at 16:03 UTC after a malformed block was sequenced.

That consensus failure stopped the chain after block 47806542, according to the network’s status incident. Deposits, withdrawals, and on-chain activity all queued behind the bad block. 

The official Base account said only that “Base Mainnet is currently halted while the team works on an issue with block production.” It stressed that funds were secure.

Read more: Hot air at AWS causes Coinbase outage

The timing was awkward. The stall hit hours before Base’s scheduled Beryl upgrade, set for 18:00 UTC that same day. 

Anyway, the incident revived a familiar criticism. Base relies on a Coinbase-operated sequencer, so one bad block can stall the entire network. A key sequencer also caused a chain halt in August 2025, the network’s last major stall prior to yesterday.

In other words, it was easy to point a lazy finger at Coinbase for the outage. That’s what happened.

Riley is a former Chainlink engineer. His post about getting fired from Coinbase mimicked the now-standard layoff-confessional format, complete with vanished Slack access and a wistful note about reflecting.

Riley is a jokester on social media and has posted another fake layoff confessional in the past.

A Community Note on X dismantled Riley’s claim: “Ravi Riley was never employed at Coinbase, as confirmed by his X bio and LinkedIn profile listing only Brookwell as current and no prior Coinbase role.” The Community Note added that his post mirrored his earlier fake firing claim about a company called Delve.

His Delve post collected 3.8 million views, a satirical jab tied to the Delve compliance scandal. His Coinbase remix kept that general format.

Despite its obvious fake content and a pending Community Note, Riley’s post remained live by early morning today.

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