AWS major outage affects blockchain delays? Cloud service centralization reveals the "decentralization illusion" of encryption.

On October 20, Amazon Web Services ( experienced a major outage, affecting thousands of websites and applications, including well-known encryption services like Coinbase, Infura, and Robinhood. This also once again exposes the contradictory reality of the “Decentralization” in the encryption industry, where some nodes rely on cloud service providers.

AWS outage affects the encryption industry: multiple exchanges and wallet services impacted

On the evening of October 20, AWS experienced a large-scale outage that disrupted thousands of websites and application services worldwide, including Disney, McDonald's, ChatGPT, Paypal, Reddit, Venmo, and Robinhood.

In the field of encryption, both Coinbase and its L2 network Base, Infura which provides blockchain APIs under ConsenSys, and even some Ethereum and its L2 nodes have reported service anomalies one after another.

Some DApps were unable to connect to the Ethereum blockchain through Infura due to an error message.

Infura later confirmed that the affected network endpoints include the Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, and Scroll.

Since Infura is responsible for the backend connections of numerous wallets and applications, once the frontend access stops, even if the mainnet consensus layer continues to produce blocks normally, most users' interfaces for interacting with the blockchain will still be in an offline state.

Why does the infrastructure provider Infura need to offer a decentralized RPC network DIN?

AWS Outage Reveals the Truth: Community Mocks the “Decentralization Illusion”

The occurrence of this event has undoubtedly sparked external attention towards blockchain networks. Former CoinDesk editor Ben Schiller and SheFi founder Maggie Love both stated on the X platform: “If we cannot connect to the Ethereum mainnet when AWS goes down, then we can't really call it Decentralization.”

The founder of the portfolio management application Rotki, Lefteris, candidly stated:

Everyone talks highly about decentralization and censorship resistance, but the reality is that the encryption ecosystem relies on the cloud. Of course, you can still run your own node without relying on the cloud, but if 99.99% of users interact through cloud nodes, then this is not a truly “decentralized” system.

Polygon's Chief Security Officer Mudit Gupta responded: “That’s just one of the RPC providers; the meaning of decentralization is to avoid complete paralysis.”

In contrast to the significant impact on L2 networks, major L1 blockchains such as Bitcoin and Solana continue to operate normally, demonstrating that the decentralized node architecture running across multiple locations can still maintain stability during cloud failures.

) Ethereum infrastructure service Infura malfunction! How to switch RPC to solve when MetaMask cannot be used? (

Centralized risk emerges: Cloud dependency becomes a blockchain hidden danger

AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and other cloud giants have long provided node hosting and API services for the encryption industry. However, this also creates the risk of “Single Point of Failure ).”

Even though the blockchain itself is decentralized, if the upper-layer applications, transaction front ends, and infrastructure are overly concentrated among a few cloud service providers, it could paralyze the entire network due to a single cloud outage.

This incident is not the first of its kind. Back in April 2025, AWS experienced a similar large-scale outage that caused multiple exchanges and infrastructures to go offline. Six months later, the industry seems to have still not learned its lesson.

As Jenkins, the Chief Operating Officer of Pocket Network, pointed out:

The original design of the Internet was to allow everyone to run their own nodes and share data, but now centralized cloud services have become mainstream, and every new application only makes this problem worse.

The challenge of decentralization lies in the infrastructure.

Returning to the blockchain and encryption field, to truly achieve the vision of decentralization, the industry may need to focus on the infrastructure layer, promoting multi-cloud deployment, self-operated nodes, decentralized RPC, and open data networks, allowing the blockchain to no longer be driven by the switches of AWS.

This article discusses whether the AWS outage affects blockchain delays? The centralization of cloud services reveals the “illusion of decentralization” in encryption. First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.