On the morning of Oct. 20, 2025, Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) skilled a significant outage that cascaded into widespread service disruptions throughout hundreds of internet sites and purposes.
A number of giant exchanges and crypto-service suppliers rely closely on cloud infrastructure like AWS to energy their buying and selling platforms, wallets, analytics instruments and matching engines.
The ripple impact hit the crypto world: Coinbase reported that its buying and selling platform and its Base layer-2 community each went down. ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood equally suffered throughout the outage.
Virtually instantly, the crypto neighborhood took to social media to sound the alarm that among the trade’s most recognizable firms are too reliant on centralized infrastructure.
“In case your blockchain is down due to the AWS outage, you’re not sufficiently decentralized,” mentioned Ben Schiller, the Head of Communications at Miden and a former CoinDesk editor, on X.
Maggie Love, the creator of SheFi, reiterated that sentiment on X: “If we can’t hook up with ethereum mainnet when AWS goes down, we aren’t decentralized.”
This wasn’t the primary time the cloud big triggered tremors throughout the crypto panorama. In April 2025, AWS suffered one other widespread disruption that knocked a number of crypto exchanges and infrastructure suppliers offline.
In the meantime, infrastructure supplier Infura, which affords backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs that assist wallets and apps hook up with blockchains, shared on Monday that the outage disrupted a number of community endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base and Scroll” had been all affected as a consequence of a “reoccurring difficulty … associated to an ongoing AWS outage.”
With Infura’s help impaired, front-end entry for a lot of purposes stalled. Although the distributed consensus layers remained intact, the gateways by way of which most customers work together with blockchains went offline, amplifying the disruption.
For layer-2 networks akin to Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base, the incident uncovered a central irony: although these methods are designed to decentralize execution and scale, lots of their front-ends, onboarding methods, infrastructure gateways and API layers nonetheless rely on centralized cloud providers. The outage underscores a persistent rigidity inside crypto — protocols that champion decentralization nonetheless typically depend on centralized infrastructure for important operations. Even when blockchain nodes are distributed, the buying and selling engines, custody platforms and relayers that join customers to them sometimes run on a handful of main cloud suppliers, creating single factors of failure.
“The AWS outage as soon as once more reminds us that blockchain, and actually, the web itself, is just as decentralized because the infrastructure it runs on,” mentioned Chris Jenkins, lead of infrastructure operations at Pocket Community, a permissionless open knowledge community.
Others emphasised that true decentralization requires constructing and working on layer-1 blockchains themselves.
“Base happening when AWS goes down is actually your complete argument in favour of EVM L1s like Sei,” mentioned Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs. “Actual decentralization is about resilience. Ethereum is decentralized. Sei is decentralized. The overwhelming majority of L2s will not be and may very well be bricked by a sufficiently big Web2 outage.”
That resilience has been demonstrated earlier than: main layer-1 networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana have continued producing blocks and processing transactions throughout the outage, due to their globally distributed validator units and unbiased node operators that aren’t tied to any single supplier. However some initiatives have opted to scale through the layer-2 route, compromising on these decentralization factors to go for quicker throughput and cheaper transaction charges.
Because the trade assesses the fallout, the push to decentralize backend infrastructure continues to achieve urgency. However whether or not it sticks this time round is difficult to inform. The incident from April prompted comparable warnings about over-reliance on centralized suppliers, but six months later, this outage confirmed that not a lot had modified.
“The web was designed with the thought in thoughts that tens of millions of individuals can be operating their very own connections to it, and sharing knowledge that approach, however with main centralized providers changing into the de facto alternative for infrastructure, each new app constructed utilizing the identical strategy solely makes the issue worse,” mentioned Jenkins of Pocket Community.
Learn extra: Binance, KuCoin, and Different Crypto Corporations Hit by Amazon Internet Service Difficulty
