A blue-check account on Yesterday, the meme fit perfectly into the predispositions of crypto investors with an irresistible confirmation bias.
Yesterday, Bitcoin and Ether hit 52-week lows. Base, Coinbase’s blockchain, was offline for about two hours. Everything went down.
The account jokingly explained that Coinbase fired Ravi Riley as “a non-technical PM of the Base sequencer team and my first PR was merged into prod at 12pm.” Multiple trackers confirmed the approximately two-hour outage, even though it was not caused by Riley, who was never a Coinbase employee.
The memetic implication was that a new addition had crashed Base and then marched out.
After all, it’s 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.
Another outage at Coinbase after Brian Armstrong laid off employees
In any case, yesterday’s meme has its origins on May 5.
Early in the morning that day, founder Brian Armstrong laid off 700 employees, or about 14% of his workforce. He revoked access on the spot, before most employees went to work in the morning: “Access to the Coinbase system has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our obligation to protect customer information.”
Within two days, the Coinbase website went down completely. While the staff reduction was likely unrelated to that outage, it didn’t matter to many critics on social media.
In an attempt to blame the layoffs on something positive, Armstrong framed the cuts as an AI-driven rebuild. Tens of millions of dollars in restructuring costs would somehow improve the company with some vague AI benefit.
I was fired from Coinbase today without warning. pic.twitter.com/n0ZoQxnBRc
— Never Goon (@nevergoon100) June 25, 2026
Layoffs and subsequent service disruption. Armstrong’s memo had spawned a meme. “Today I Got Fired from Coinbase” became an instant hit.
The most popular variants claimed absurd performance, especially Coinbase operations that crypto traders hated: issuing 1099s, freezing accounts, implementing the 4H chart, and caching websites.
As with any social media meme, people are recreating it in endless variations to make Coinbase the punchline for layoffs that never literally happened, as a way to make fun of Coinbase’s shortcomings.
The base outage ends, but Coinbase memes continue
Yesterday, Base resumed normal block production within about two hours. Block production stopped 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 were all queued up behind the bad block.
The official Base account said only that “Base Mainnet is currently suspended while the team works on a block production issue.” It emphasized that the funds were safe.
Was Coinbase doxx its first bitcoin mortgage customer?
The timing was difficult. The outage occurred hours before Base’s scheduled Beryl upgrade, which was scheduled to take place at 18:00 UTC the same day.
In any case, the incident revived a well-known criticism. Base relies on a Coinbase-operated sequencer, so one bad block can block the entire network. A key sequencer also caused a chain shutdown in August 2025, the last major shutdown of the network before yesterday.
In other words, it was easy to point a lazy finger at Coinbase for the outage. That’s what happened.
A repeat joker makes Coinbase the punchline
Riley is a former Chainlink engineer. His message about his resignation from Coinbase mimicked the now standard resignation-confessional format, complete with lost Slack access and a wistful note about reflection.
Riley is a prankster on social media and has posted a false resignation confession in the past.
A community note about The Community Note added that his post mirrored his previous claim about a company called Delve.
His Delve post was viewed 3.8 million times, a satirical joke related to the Delve compliance scandal. His Coinbase remix kept that general format.
Despite the obvious fake content and a pending community note, Riley’s post remained live early this morning.