Prior to the fork of Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC) on Aug 1, Coinbase was strongly against adjusting their backend for the fork, and rejecting BCC.  But apparently somethings happened in the two days to take them from strongly being against it to, 'we're programming it into Coinbase as fast as we can!'.

Their email that they sent out on Aug 3rd,

When a digital currency forks, it creates a new digital asset. Adding new digital assets to Coinbase must be approached with caution. Not every asset is immediately safe to add to Coinbase from a technical stability, security, or compliance point of view.

In the case of bitcoin cash, we made clear to our customers that we did not feel we could safely support it on the day it was launched. For customers who wanted immediate access to their bitcoin cash, we advised them to withdraw their bitcoin from the Coinbase platform. However, there are several points we want to make clear for our customers:

We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time.

I wonder how many people pulled out their bitcoin for them to change their mind, I for one, had pulled out my bitcoin from Coinbase prior to the fork.