On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Net Providers (AWS) skilled a serious outage that precipitated widespread service disruptions throughout 1000’s of internet sites and purposes.
A number of giant exchanges and crypto service suppliers rely closely on cloud infrastructure corresponding to AWS to energy their buying and selling platforms, wallets, analytical instruments, and matching engines.
The ripple impact additionally affected the world of cryptocurrencies. Coinbase reported that each its buying and selling platform and base layer 2 community had been down. ConsenSys' Infura and Robinhood had been equally impaired.
Nearly instantly, the crypto group took to social media to warn that among the trade's most distinguished corporations had been relying an excessive amount of on centralized infrastructure.
“If the blockchain goes down due to an AWS outage, it’s not decentralized sufficient,” Ben Schiller, head of communications at Miden and former CoinDesk editor, mentioned of X.
Maggie Love, the creator of SheFi, echoed that concept in X. “If we are able to’t hook up with Ethereum’s mainnet when AWS goes down, we’re not decentralized.”
This wasn't the primary time the cloud big precipitated tremors throughout the crypto trade. In April 2025, AWS skilled one other main disruption that took a number of cryptocurrency exchanges and infrastructure suppliers offline.
In the meantime, infrastructure supplier Infura, which supplies backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs to assist wallets and apps hook up with the blockchain, shared on Monday that an outage disrupted a number of community endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll” had been all affected by “recurrent points associated to ongoing AWS outages.”
With Infura help damaged, front-end entry for a lot of purposes stopped. Though the decentralized consensus layer remained intact, the gateway by which most customers work together with the blockchain went offline, including to the chaos.
For Layer 2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base, this incident revealed a central irony. Though these techniques are designed to decentralize execution and scale, lots of the entrance ends, onboarding techniques, infrastructure gateways, and API layers nonetheless depend on centralized cloud companies. The outage highlights continued tensions inside cryptocurrencies. Protocols that promote decentralization typically nonetheless depend on centralized infrastructure for crucial operations. Even when blockchain nodes are distributed, the buying and selling engines, custody platforms, and relayers that join customers usually run on a number of main cloud suppliers, making a single level of failure.
“The AWS outage is yet one more reminder that blockchain, and certainly the Web itself, is simply as decentralized because the infrastructure it runs on,” mentioned Chris Jenkins, director of infrastructure operations at Pocket Community, a permissionless open information community.
Others emphasised that true decentralization requires constructing and working a layer 1 blockchain itself.
“When AWS goes down, so does the bottom, which is actually the entire argument in favor of an EVM L1 like Sei,” mentioned Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs. “True decentralization is about resiliency. Ethereum is decentralized. Sei is decentralized. Most of L2 shouldn’t be decentralized, and a big sufficient Web2 outage might cripple it.”
Its resilience has been demonstrated earlier than. Main Layer 1 networks corresponding to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana continued to generate blocks and course of transactions in the course of the outage due to globally distributed validator units and impartial node operators that aren’t tied to a single supplier. Nonetheless, some tasks select to scale through the Layer 2 route, sacrificing these decentralization factors in favor of quicker throughput and cheaper transaction charges.
Efforts to decentralize backend infrastructure proceed to realize urgency because the trade assesses its affect. Nonetheless, it’s tough to guage whether or not it will stick this time as nicely. The April incident raised comparable warnings about over-reliance on centralized suppliers, however this outage, six months later, reveals that not a lot has modified.
“The Web was designed with the thought in thoughts that thousands and thousands of individuals would independently hook up with the Web and share information in that method. However now that main centralized companies have change into the de facto selection for infrastructure, each new app constructed utilizing the identical method solely makes the issue worse,” mentioned Pocket Community's Jenkins.
Learn extra: Binance, KuCoin and different crypto corporations hit by Amazon Net Providers points
