Summary:
On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage, disrupting thousands of websites and applications, including key players in the crypto industry like Coinbase, Base L2, and ConsenSys’ Infura. The incident highlighted the over-reliance of crypto infrastructure on centralized cloud providers, sparking debates about true decentralization. Despite the distributed nature of blockchain networks, critical front-end systems and APIs remain dependent on centralized services, creating vulnerabilities.
What This Means for You:
- Assess Your Crypto Platform’s Reliance on Centralized Infrastructure: Ensure that your transactions and access to blockchain networks are not solely dependent on services like AWS.
- Advocate for Decentralized Solutions: Support projects that prioritize decentralized infrastructure to reduce single points of failure.
- Monitor Layer-1 Blockchains for Resilience: Consider using Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Solana for transactions during outages, as their distributed validator sets often remain operational.
- Future Outlook: Expect increased industry focus on decentralizing backend infrastructure, though progress may be slow due to existing dependencies.
Base, ETH L2 Access Hit by Amazon’s AWS Failure:
On the morning of Oct. 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage that cascaded into widespread service disruptions across thousands of websites and applications. Several large exchanges and crypto-service providers rely heavily on cloud infrastructure like AWS to power their trading platforms, wallets, analytics tools, and matching engines.
The ripple effect hit the crypto world: Coinbase reported that its trading platform and its Base layer-2 network both went down. ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood similarly suffered during the outage.
Almost immediately, the crypto community took to social media to sound the alarm that some of the industry’s most recognizable companies are too reliant on centralized infrastructure. “If your blockchain is down because of the AWS outage, you’re not sufficiently decentralized,” said 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 cannot connect to ethereum mainnet when AWS goes down, we are not decentralized.”
This wasn’t the first time the cloud giant caused tremors across the crypto landscape. In April 2025, AWS suffered another widespread disruption that knocked several crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline.
Meanwhile, infrastructure provider Infura, which offers backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs that help wallets and apps connect to blockchains, shared on Monday that the outage disrupted multiple network endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll” were all affected due to a “reoccurring issue … related to an ongoing AWS outage.”
With Infura’s support impaired, front-end access for many applications stalled. Even though the distributed consensus layers remained intact, the gateways through which most users interact with blockchains went offline, amplifying the disruption.
For layer-2 networks such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base, the incident exposed a central irony: though these systems are designed to decentralize execution and scale, many of their front-ends, onboarding systems, infrastructure gateways, and API layers still depend on centralized cloud services. The outage underscores a persistent tension within crypto — protocols that champion decentralization still often rely on centralized infrastructure for critical operations. Even if blockchain nodes are distributed, the trading engines, custody platforms, and relayers that connect users to them typically run on a handful of major cloud providers, creating single points of failure.
“The AWS outage once again reminds us that blockchain, and really, the internet itself, is only as decentralized as the infrastructure it runs on,” said Chris Jenkins, lead of infrastructure operations at Pocket Network, a permissionless open data network.
Others emphasized that true decentralization requires building and operating on layer-1 blockchains themselves. “Base going down when AWS goes down is literally the entire argument in favour of EVM L1s like Sei,” said Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs. “Real decentralization is about resilience. Ethereum is decentralized. Sei is decentralized. The vast majority of L2s are not and could be bricked by a big enough Web2 outage.”
That resilience has been demonstrated before: major layer-1 networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana have continued producing blocks and processing transactions during the outage, thanks to their globally distributed validator sets and independent node operators that aren’t tied to any single provider. But some projects have opted to scale via the layer-2 route, compromising on those decentralization points to opt for faster throughput and cheaper transaction fees.
As the industry assesses the fallout, the push to decentralize backend infrastructure continues to gain urgency. But whether it sticks this time around is hard to tell. The incident from April prompted similar warnings about over-reliance on centralized providers, yet six months later, this outage showed that not much had changed.
“The internet was designed with the idea in mind that millions of people would be running their own connections to it, and sharing data that way, but with major centralized services becoming the de facto choice for infrastructure, every new app built using the same approach only makes the problem worse,” said Jenkins of Pocket Network.
Read more: Binance, KuCoin, and Other Crypto Firms Hit by Amazon Web Service Issue
Extra Information:
Infura Status Page: Track real-time updates on Infura’s network endpoints and outages. CoinDesk Report: Learn more about the April 2025 AWS outage and its impact on the crypto industry.
People Also Ask About:
- What caused the AWS outage? The outage was due to issues within AWS’s infrastructure, affecting multiple services globally.
- How does AWS impact crypto platforms? Many crypto platforms rely on AWS for hosting trading engines, wallets, and APIs, making them vulnerable to AWS disruptions.
- Are layer-2 blockchains truly decentralized? While layer-2s decentralize execution, their reliance on centralized infrastructure for front-end operations compromises true decentralization.
- Can Bitcoin and Ethereum survive AWS outages? Yes, both networks continued operating during the outage due to their distributed validator sets.
- What are the alternatives to AWS for crypto platforms? Projects like Pocket Network offer decentralized infrastructure solutions to reduce reliance on centralized providers.
Expert Opinion:
“The AWS outage highlights a critical vulnerability in the crypto ecosystem: decentralization remains incomplete if critical infrastructure depends on centralized providers. The industry must prioritize building resilient, decentralized backend systems to safeguard against future disruptions,” says Chris Jenkins, Lead of Infrastructure Operations at Pocket Network.
Key Terms:
- AWS outage impact on crypto
- Decentralized blockchain infrastructure
- Layer-2 network vulnerabilities
- Crypto reliance on cloud services
- Ethereum mainnet resilience
- Decentralized API solutions
- Cloud infrastructure single points of failure
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