On Monday morning, an AWS disruption led to major internet outages — including across the cryptocurrency sector.

Several blockchain services — including Infura, a key infrastructure provider for Ethereum — were temporarily unavailable. According to Infura’s official status report, multiple JSON-RPC endpoints experienced outages. Affected networks included Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Base, and Scroll.

“Our infrastructure is currently experiencing an outage. We are working on a fix. Customers with failover enabled will be automatically routed,” the Infura update said.

In practice, many users couldn’t connect to the blockchain. Wallets like MetaMask and apps such as Uniswap returned errors. That’s what makes this incident particularly telling — a similar situation already occurred in April this year with exchanges like Binance. Criticism of centralized Web3 infrastructure has grown louder on social media once again.

One of the core promises of the blockchain movement is decentralization. But how real is it if most applications depend on centralized services running on the same servers as conventional web platforms? This question keeps coming up.

Reliance on cloud providers brings several risks. First, a single point of failure: when a major provider like AWS goes down, large parts of the Web3 ecosystem can be paralyzed. Second, there are censorship and control risks, since cloud providers could theoretically filter requests or block access. For example, in 2022, the German host Hetzner banned a number of Solana validators, noticeably impacting the network. Finally, there’s regional concentration: much of the crypto infrastructure is controlled by a handful of U.S. tech giants.

Dependence on AWS and others is gradually decreasing

According to Messari data, around 70% of all Ethereum nodes in 2022 were hosted on centralized services. More than half of those ran on Amazon Web Services (AWS), followed by Hetzner Online and OVH. Even infrastructure providers like Infura — which many wallets and DeFi apps use to access Ethereum — host their systems primarily on AWS or comparable clouds. Ethernodes data indicates this dependency has since declined to roughly 50%.

Dependence on AWS and others is gradually decreasing
Consensus Layer Hosting ISPs. Ethernodes.org

There are emerging alternatives — for example, Ankr and Lava — that rely on decentralized RPC networks, distributing requests across independent nodes. In theory, this can reduce dependency on large cloud companies. In practice, however, these approaches remain less common and more technically demanding, so many projects continue to use centralized platforms.

Bottom line: the AWS outage again showed that decentralization in the crypto sector often remains largely theoretical. As long as infrastructure relies heavily on centralized cloud solutions like AWS, the ecosystem will remain vulnerable to external disruptions. The blockchain itself may keep running — but without cloud access points, it becomes temporarily unreachable for many users.