A major outage at Amazon Web Services on October 20, 2025, halted operations for several prominent cryptocurrency services. Platforms including Coinbase, Infura, and Robinhood experienced downtime, highlighting the industry's reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. This incident echoes a similar disruption earlier in the year.
On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a significant outage that rippled through thousands of websites and applications worldwide. In the cryptocurrency sector, the disruption severely impacted key players dependent on AWS for their trading platforms, wallets, analytics tools, and matching engines.
Coinbase reported that both its main trading platform and its Base layer-2 network went offline during the event. ConsenSys' Infura, which provides backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs for connecting wallets and apps to blockchains, also faced issues. Infura stated that the outage affected multiple network endpoints, including “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base and Scroll,” due to a “reoccurring issue … related to an ongoing AWS outage.” Robinhood similarly experienced service interruptions.
Although the distributed consensus layers of these blockchains remained operational, the front-end gateways that most users rely on for interaction stalled, magnifying the effects. The crypto community quickly turned to social media to criticize the sector's heavy dependence on centralized providers like AWS, underscoring vulnerabilities in what is often touted as a decentralized ecosystem.
This was not the first such incident; in April 2025, another AWS disruption had knocked several crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline. The repeated outages raise ongoing concerns about resilience in crypto infrastructure, even as the core blockchain networks proved unaffected.