tl;dr
An AWS outage on April 15 disrupted major crypto platforms like Binance and KuCoin, causing temporary service interruptions and transaction failures. Binance paused withdrawals briefly but resumed them within an hour, while KuCoin confirmed user funds remained safe. Other services like Rabby and DeB...
On April 15, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted several major cryptocurrency platforms, revealing a critical vulnerability in the industry's reliance on centralized infrastructure.
Leading exchanges like Binance and KuCoin faced temporary service interruptions and transaction failures. Binance paused withdrawals as a precaution but resumed them within an hour, while KuCoin assured users that their funds remained secure. Other affected services included the crypto wallet Rabby and analytics provider DeBank, both experiencing temporary disruptions.
The outage, caused by power interruptions at AWS’s primary and backup systems, impacted 15 AWS services and led to delayed responses and failed connections, particularly affecting EC2 instances and AWS's relational database service.
This incident sparked renewed calls for decentralized backend systems, emphasizing the cryptocurrency community’s core principle of eliminating single points of failure. Santeri Aramo, co-founder of Auki Network, highlighted this by stating that decentralized infrastructure ensures no gatekeeper and full control over one's funds.
AWS resolved the issue swiftly and assured no further problems were expected. However, given AWS's dominant hold over global cloud infrastructure, the outage served as a cautionary tale about the risks inherent in centralizing critical crypto operations under a single provider—precisely the type of risk the crypto industry seeks to avoid.