AWS outage exposes crypto industry’s vulnerability to centralized infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a temporary outage on April 15 that disrupted several major crypto platforms and reignited concerns over the industry’s dependence on centralized infrastructure.

On Social media platform X, Binance, the world’s leading crypto exchange by volume, revealed that it temporarily suspended withdrawals as a precaution after facing connectivity issues.

The exchange confirmed that some transaction orders failed due to the AWS disruption.

However, less than an hour later, Binance announced that services were recovering and withdrawals had resumed, although delays might persist during the full system restoration.

Another major crypto trading platform, KuCoin, reported disruptions caused by the AWS incident. The exchange assured users their funds and data remained safe while its technical team worked on a fix.

Other platforms, including crypto wallet Rabby and analytics provider DeBank, also posted service interruption notices.

The outage sparked renewed conversations around the need for decentralized backend systems.

Santeri Aramo, co-founder of Auki Network, called the disruption proof of centralized vulnerability. He said:

“This is exactly why we build decentralized infrastructure. No single point of failure. No gatekeeper. No lock on your funds. Own your keys. Own your future.”

Why AWS suffered an outage

The AWS disruption occurred between 12:40 A.M. and 1:43 A.M. PDT, affecting 15 different services.

Amazon explained that the incident was caused by power interruptions at both its primary and backup systems were responsible. While most services were restored quickly, its relational database service remained affected at the time of the update.

During the outage, users experienced delayed responses and failed connections tied to EC2 instances in the affected zone.

Meanwhile, AWS assured users the issue had been resolved, and no recurring problems were expected.

AWS currently holds a dominant share of the global cloud infrastructure market.

This incident highlighted the risk of centralizing critical operations under one service provider, a risk crypto platforms often aim to eliminate in their core mission.

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