A major outage at Amazon Web Services on October 20, 2025, caused widespread disruptions in the cryptocurrency sector. Platforms like Coinbase's trading service and Base layer-2 network went offline, highlighting the industry's reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. Community members criticized the lack of true decentralization in affected systems.
On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a significant outage that impacted thousands of websites and applications worldwide. This event rippled through the crypto industry, where many exchanges and service providers depend on AWS for trading platforms, wallets, analytics, and matching engines.
Coinbase reported downtime for its trading platform and Base layer-2 network. ConsenSys’ Infura, which provides backend APIs for connecting wallets and apps to blockchains, also faced issues, affecting Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll due to the AWS problem. Robinhood experienced similar disruptions.
The crypto community quickly highlighted the irony of relying on centralized services. “If your blockchain is down because of the AWS outage, you’re not sufficiently decentralized,” said Ben Schiller, Head of Communications at Miden and former CoinDesk editor, on X. Maggie Love, creator of SheFi, echoed this: “If we cannot connect to ethereum mainnet when AWS goes down, we are not decentralized.”
This was not the first such incident; an AWS disruption in April 2025 had similarly affected crypto exchanges and providers. Layer-2 networks, designed for scalability, often depend on centralized cloud services for front-ends and APIs, creating single points of failure despite distributed consensus layers.
“The AWS outage once again reminds us that blockchain, and really, the internet itself, is only as decentralized as the infrastructure it runs on,” noted Chris Jenkins, lead of infrastructure operations at Pocket Network. Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, argued: “Base going down when AWS goes down is literally the entire argument in favour of EVM L1s like Sei. Real decentralization is about resilience. Ethereum is decentralized. Sei is decentralized. The vast majority of L2s are not and could be bricked by a big enough Web2 outage.”
In contrast, layer-1 networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana continued producing blocks and processing transactions, thanks to their distributed validators and independent nodes. The April event prompted calls for more decentralization, but the October outage showed limited progress. As Jenkins added, “The internet was designed with the idea in mind that millions of people would be running their own connections to it, and sharing data that way, but with major centralized services becoming the de facto choice for infrastructure, every new app built using the same approach only makes the problem worse.”