TLDR
- Amazon AWS outage on October 20-21, 2025 took down Coinbase, Base network, Robinhood, and Infura
- Layer-2 networks including Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Scroll, and Base stopped working
- Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana layer-1 blockchains continued operating normally throughout the outage
- The incident exposed crypto’s reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure despite decentralization claims
- This is the second major AWS disruption affecting crypto in 2025, following a similar outage in April
Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage starting October 20, 2025, that revealed deep problems in the cryptocurrency industry. The disruption began at Amazon’s US-EAST-1 data center in Virginia and lasted through most of the workday.
The outage affected thousands of websites and applications worldwide. Amazon blamed the problems on its domain name system and DynamoDB database service failures.
Major cryptocurrency platforms went offline during the AWS disruption. Coinbase reported its trading platform stopped working, along with its Base layer-2 network.
Robinhood and ConsenSys’ Infura also experienced service failures. Infura provides critical infrastructure that connects wallets and apps to blockchain networks.
Crypto Platforms Fail Decentralization Test
Infura confirmed that multiple blockchain networks lost connectivity during the outage. Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll all experienced disruptions.
The crypto community quickly pointed out the irony. Platforms claiming to be decentralized went completely offline due to a single company’s server problems.
Ben Schiller from Miden stated that blockchains down because of AWS outages are not sufficiently decentralized. Maggie Love from SheFi said the inability to connect to Ethereum mainnet during AWS failures proves the system lacks true decentralization.
Layer-2 networks faced the harshest criticism. These platforms are designed to scale blockchain technology while maintaining decentralization.
However, the outage revealed that many layer-2 networks still depend on centralized cloud services. Their front-ends, API layers, and infrastructure gateways all rely on providers like AWS.
Jay Jog from Sei Labs argued the incident demonstrates the value of layer-1 blockchains. He noted that Base failing when AWS fails proves the importance of running on layer-1 networks.
Layer-1 Blockchains Stay Online
Major layer-1 blockchains continued operating normally during the entire outage. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana kept producing blocks and processing transactions.
These networks use globally distributed validator sets and independent node operators. They do not depend on any single cloud provider for operations.
Chris Jenkins from Pocket Network said the outage shows blockchain is only as decentralized as its infrastructure. The internet itself faces the same centralization problem.
Three companies control most internet infrastructure today. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate the cloud services market.
Large enterprises can afford to use multiple cloud providers as backup systems. Smaller companies cannot afford this redundancy and remain vulnerable to single-provider failures.
This was not the first AWS disruption to affect crypto services in 2025. A similar outage occurred in April that knocked crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline.
The April incident prompted warnings about over-reliance on centralized cloud providers. Six months later, the October outage showed the industry had not addressed these concerns.
The AWS problems started with domain name system failures that convert website addresses into numerical IP addresses. DynamoDB database issues compounded the problems and created cascading failures across Amazon’s infrastructure.
Infura reported the outage caused recurring issues related to the ongoing AWS problems. Even though blockchain consensus layers remained intact, users could not access them through standard gateways.
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