The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, lasting around 15 hours, impacted major crypto platforms like Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask, and Venmo. This situation raised concerns about the level of decentralization within Web3. While blockchains continued to operate normally, users faced challenges accessing their wallets and exchanging services due to their reliance on centralized server hosting.

“Decentralization has succeeded at the ledger layer but not yet at the infrastructure layer,” stated Jamie Elkaleh, CMO of Bitget Wallet. “Real resilience depends on diversifying beyond hyperscalers into community-driven and distributed networks.”
Translation: He emphasized that decentralization in infrastructure remains unachieved, calling for a broader distribution beyond major service providers.

Web3’s resilience was also questioned by Anthurine Xiang, co-founder at EthStorage and QuarkChain. She argued that true decentralization involves restructuring layers from storage to access to prevent any single service from shutting down systems. “It’s like the house is fine, but the door is jammed,” she illustrated, reflecting on how this situation left users unable to access operational blockchains.

The AWS interruption triggered failures in services critical to users, locking them out of their accounts and leading to transaction delays. Users of MetaMask reported seeing zero balances, although their assets were safe on the blockchain, as the service retrieving that data had ceased.

Jawad Ashraf from Vanar Blockchain criticized the industry for its dependency on similar hosting services, stating that approximately 70% of Ethereum nodes rely on centralized servers. He concluded that building completely decentralized systems is feasible but often overlooked as it requires more time and complexity compared to using established cloud services.

Elkaleh suggested that this disruption should drive attention towards investing in decentralized networking options and urged Web3 developers to integrate hybrid networks, blending traditional reliability with decentralized solutions.

“Every major outage is a wake-up call,” he concluded, stressing the need for Web3’s infrastructure to evolve in its distribution.