On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a significant outage that triggered extensive service interruptions across countless websites and applications.
Numerous large exchanges and cryptocurrency service providers heavily depend on cloud infrastructure like AWS to operate their trading platforms, wallets, analytics tools, and matching engines.
The repercussions were felt in the crypto sphere: Coinbase announced that its trading platform and its Base layer-2 network both experienced downtime. Similarly, ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood encountered issues during the outage.
Almost instantly, the crypto community took to social media to highlight concerns that some of the industry’s most prominent companies are overly reliant on centralized infrastructure.
“If your blockchain is down due to the AWS outage, you’re not sufficiently decentralized,” stated Ben Schiller, Head of Communications at Miden and a previous CoinDesk editor, on X.
Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, echoed that sentiment on X: “If we cannot connect to Ethereum mainnet when AWS is down, we are not decentralized.”
This was not the first instance of the cloud giant causing disturbances in the crypto environment. In April 2025, AWS experienced another widespread outage that brought several crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline.
In the meantime, infrastructure provider Infura, which delivers backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs to assist wallets and applications in connecting to blockchains, reported on Monday that the outage affected multiple network endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll” were all impacted due to a “recurring issue … tied to an ongoing AWS outage.”
With Infura’s services disrupted, front-end access for many applications was halted. Although the distributed consensus layers remained operational, the gateways through which most users connect to blockchains went offline, exacerbating the disruption.
For layer-2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base, the incident revealed an inherent irony: despite these systems being designed to decentralize execution and scalability, many of their frontends, onboarding systems, infrastructure gateways, and API layers still rely on centralized cloud services. The outage highlights a persistent tension within crypto—protocols that advocate decentralization still frequently depend on centralized infrastructure for essential operations. Even if blockchain nodes are dispersed, the trading engines, custody platforms, and relayers that connect users to them typically operate on a select few major cloud providers, creating single points of failure.
“The AWS outage once more illustrates that blockchain, and indeed the internet itself, is only as decentralized as the infrastructure it relies upon,” remarked Chris Jenkins, lead of infrastructure operations at Pocket Network, a permissionless open data network.
Others stressed that genuine decentralization necessitates building and utilizing layer-1 blockchains themselves.
“Base shutting down when AWS goes down precisely supports the argument in favor of EVM L1s like Sei,” noted Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs. “Real decentralization centers on resilience. Ethereum is decentralized. Sei is decentralized. The vast majority of L2s are not and could be rendered inoperative by a sufficiently large Web2 outage.”
This resilience has been demonstrated previously: major layer-1 networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana have continued creating blocks and processing transactions during outages, thanks to their globally distributed validator sets and independent node operators that aren’t tied to any single provider. However, some projects have chosen to scale via the layer-2 approach, compromising on these decentralization aspects for quicker throughput and lower transaction fees.
As the industry evaluates the repercussions, the urgency to decentralize backend infrastructure intensifies. But whether this will result in lasting change is uncertain. The incident from April prompted similar warnings about over-dependence on centralized providers, yet six months later, this outage revealed that little had altered.
“The internet was created with the idea that millions of people would be running their own connections and sharing data, but with major centralized services becoming the go-to choice for infrastructure, every new application built with the same approach only exacerbates the issue,” noted Jenkins of Pocket Network.
Read more: Binance, KuCoin, and Other Crypto Firms Affected by Amazon Web Service Issue
