- An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025, disrupted thousands of websites and apps.
- Major crypto platforms including Coinbase, ConsenSys’ Infura, and Robinhood were affected due to their reliance on AWS cloud services.
- The incident highlighted the crypto industry’s dependence on centralized infrastructure despite decentralized blockchain technology.
- Layer-2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and Scroll faced significant disruptions since their front-end services rely on centralized clouds.
- True decentralization requires resilience through independent infrastructure, as demonstrated by layer-1 blockchains Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, which remained operational.
On the morning of October 20, 2025, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruptions affecting thousands of websites and applications globally. Several leading crypto exchanges and services that depend on AWS for Hosting faced interruptions.
Coinbase confirmed that both its trading platform and its Base layer-2 network went offline due to the outage. Other key crypto infrastructure providers, including ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood, also experienced outages during this period.
Infura, which supplies backend APIs essential for connecting wallets and applications to blockchains, stated that multiple network endpoints for Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll were impacted by a “reoccurring issue … related to an ongoing AWS outage.” This disruption hindered user access to blockchain networks, even though the underlying blockchains continued to operate normally.
The outage reignited concerns in the crypto community about over-reliance on centralized cloud services. Ben Schiller, Head of Communications at Miden, said on X, “If your blockchain is down because of the AWS outage, you’re not sufficiently decentralized.” Maggie Love, creator of SheFi, added, “If we cannot connect to ethereum mainnet when AWS goes down, we are not decentralized.”
While layer-2 networks aim to increase scalability by processing transactions off main blockchains, many still depend heavily on centralized cloud providers for their user-facing services. This creates vulnerabilities as these centralized points can fail, as demonstrated by this outage.
In contrast, major layer-1 blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana maintained operations during the AWS failure thanks to their globally distributed validators and independent operators. Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, remarked, “Base going down when AWS goes down is literally the entire argument in favour of EVM L1s like Sei.” He emphasized that true decentralization provides resilience from such failures.
This incident follows a similar AWS disruption in April 2025, which also affected crypto exchanges and infrastructure. Despite previous warnings, the crypto sector remains heavily dependent on a few cloud providers, raising ongoing questions about the robustness of its infrastructure.
Chris Jenkins, lead of infrastructure operations at Pocket Network, summed up the issue saying, “Blockchain, and really, the internet itself, is only as decentralized as the infrastructure it runs on.”
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