On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major disruption, resulting in widespread service disruption across thousands of websites and applications.
Many 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 both its trading platform and its Base layer-2 network were shut down. ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood also suffered similar losses during the outage.
Almost immediately, the crypto community took to social media to issue warnings that some of the industry’s most recognizable companies are too reliant on centralized infrastructure.
“If your blockchain is down due to an AWS outage, you are not decentralized enough,” Ben Schiller, head of communications at Midden and former CoinDesk editor, said on Twitter.
Maggie Love, creator of Sheffy, echoed that sentiment on X: “If we can’t connect to the Ethereum mainnet when AWS is down, we’re not decentralized.”
This was not the first time the cloud giant caused shockwaves in the crypto landscape. In April 2025, AWS suffered another widespread disruption that took many crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline.
Meanwhile, infrastructure provider Infra, which provides backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs that help connect wallets and apps to the blockchain, 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 “recurring issue … related to the ongoing AWS outage.”
With Infura’s support being poor, front-end access to many applications was halted. Even though the distributed consensus layers remained intact, the gateways through which most users interact with the blockchain went offline, increasing the disruption.
For layer-2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base, the incident highlighted a central irony: Although these systems are designed to decentralize execution and scale, many of their front-end, onboarding systems, infrastructure gateways, and API layers still rely on centralized cloud services. The outage underscores persistent tensions within crypto — protocols that champion decentralization still rely on centralized infrastructure for critical operations. Even though 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 a single point of failure.
“The AWS outage once again reminds us that blockchain, and indeed, the Internet, is only as decentralized as the infrastructure it runs on,” said Chris Jenkins, head of infrastructure operations at Pocket Network, a permissionless open data network.
Others emphasized that true decentralization requires building and operating on the layer-1 blockchain itself.
“Base going down when AWS goes down is virtually the entire argument in favor of an EVM L1 like SEI,” said Jay Jog, co-founder of SEI Labs. “Real decentralization is about resiliency. Ethereum is decentralized. SEI is decentralized. The vast majority of L2 cannot be disrupted due to a substantial 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 outages, thanks to their globally distributed validator sets and independent node operators that are not tied to any single provider. But some projects have opted to scale via the layer-2 route, compromising on those decentralization points in order to opt for faster throughput and cheaper transaction fees.
As the industry assesses the consequences, there is a push to decentralize the backend infrastructure. But it is difficult to say whether this time it will last or not. The April incident prompted similar warnings about excessive reliance on centralized providers, yet six months later, this outage showed that not much had changed.
Pocket Network’s Jenkins said, “The Internet was designed with the idea that millions of people would be running their own connections to it, and sharing data that way, but as major centralized services have become the de facto alternative to infrastructure, every new app built using the same approach only makes the problem worse.”
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