This will not be the first time Coinbase has failed it's customers. In the most critical times their systems crash and people miss
out on opportunities. This is one of the reasons why I hate third party services and prefer to deal with people directly. We
should either stop using these services or continue using them, but only for Fiat conversion. Trade bitcoins directly and not
through third party intermediaries.
What other options are there? Especially if you want to trade on a decent platform such as GDAX there is really no substitute. ShapeShift is really the only other decent have seen and they are for small volumes. Sure cold storage is great if you just want to old on to them but you can not trade or increase your holdings very well that way. Coinbase should
probably have seen this coming and somehow accounted for it.. but then again maybe that would have exposed something, maybe they are covering up a hack? Who knows.