Original Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On April 15, Binance announced that the AWS data center network experienced a temporary outage, causing issues with some of the platform's services. Some orders were still successful, but others failed. All services are gradually being restored, and the withdrawal function has also been restored. During the full recovery of the system, some services may experience delays.
The impact was not limited to Binance; platforms such as DeBank and Kucoin also issued announcements stating that all DeBank services were temporarily unavailable due to the AWS service interruption. Their team is continuously monitoring the situation and will restore access as soon as possible.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of on-demand services, including computing power, storage, databases, and other functionalities. According to the outage.now website, the platform began experiencing issues at 16:14 and is currently gradually returning to normal.
Although this incident did not trigger widespread risks to on-chain assets or market volatility, it once again highlighted an old issue: the crypto world claims to be decentralized, yet at the most critical infrastructure level, it remains deeply mired in centralized dependence.
AWS is a comprehensive cloud computing platform that provides various services, including computing power, storage, databases, and network transmission, hosting a large number of core internet applications. In the Web3 ecosystem, many exchanges, wallet services, dApp front and back ends, oracle nodes, and on-chain indexing services are built on AWS architecture. Therefore, every AWS outage is not just a cloud service issue but a substantial impact on the underlying logic of the entire crypto industry.
From this incident, it is evident that both centralized exchanges like Binance and KuCoin, as well as Web3 wallet and asset tracking platforms like DeBank and Zapper, were affected to varying degrees after the AWS failure. Notably, DeBank directly announced that "all services are temporarily unavailable," indicating that even lightweight Web3 tools may come to a standstill due to the outage of a centralized cloud platform.
Not the First Incident
Looking back, similar incidents are not new. In December 2021, a massive outage in the AWS US East (us-east-1) region became one of the most severe incidents in recent years, affecting mainstream trading platforms such as Coinbase, Binance.US, Kraken, and dYdX. At that time, Coinbase users experienced API connection failures, trading delays, and asset reading errors, while dYdX announced a complete service suspension. Although it operates as a DEX, its front end and data interfaces still rely on AWS services.
MetaMask was also affected, as its default RPC service provider Infura, which connects to the Ethereum network, is hosted on AWS, leading to some users being unable to access on-chain data and transaction broadcasts failing. Similarly, aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, which rely on AWS for data processing capabilities, reported access delays and interruptions in data updates.
Another typical incident occurred in 2020 when AWS's Kinesis Data Streams service experienced an outage, affecting many platforms that rely on real-time data stream processing. Coinbase was again impacted, experiencing service degradation. CoinGecko also reported issues with market data delays. This incident illustrates that the crypto sector's dependence on AWS extends beyond web front ends or basic hosting, penetrating deeply into real-time market data processing and trading system internal logic.
The commonality among these events is that when AWS encounters issues, not only do centralized trading platform services collapse, but the use of some decentralized protocols is also severely disrupted. This phenomenon of stable on-chain protocols and collapsed off-chain interfaces is one of the most tension-filled contradictions in the current decentralization process of Web3 infrastructure.
Challenges Remain Significant
Although public chain nodes like Ethereum and Bitcoin are distributed globally and will not completely collapse due to a service interruption in one location, many Web3 projects still rely on AWS or other leading cloud service providers for user access points, data synchronization paths, and front-end interfaces. Particularly for some emerging projects, their node deployments are often concentrated in the same region, and once cloud services fail, the entire network's access capability will suffer a severe blow.
As the demand for cloud resources rapidly rises due to AI, Web3, and data services, the global cloud service market is showing a highly concentrated pattern. According to Statista data, by the end of 2024, AWS's market share is projected to be 31%, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud ranking second and third, respectively. This high dependence on a few vendors means that a single point of failure in infrastructure is not just a problem for one company but poses a systemic risk to the entire ecosystem.
Some developers and project teams in the industry have begun exploring alternative paths such as multi-cloud disaster recovery, IPFS front-end hosting, and Rollup self-deployment of nodes to reduce reliance on Web2 infrastructure. However, these solutions often face real-world challenges such as high development thresholds, rising costs, and complex user experiences, resulting in very few projects being genuinely implemented.
While this AWS outage may not lead to direct economic losses, it serves as an important wake-up call. Between the ideal goal of decentralization and the reality of operational mechanisms, Web3 still needs to undergo a deeper reconstruction of its infrastructure.
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