A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has exposed a critical vulnerability in the Web3 ecosystem — its heavy reliance on centralised cloud providers. Despite being built on the promise of decentralisation, many blockchain startups and decentralised applications (dApps) depend on infrastructure controlled by a few large companies like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The outage, which disrupted several regions for hours, affected a range of Web3 projects — from decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols to NFT marketplaces and blockchain data analytics firms. While the blockchain networks themselves continued running, many front-end interfaces, APIs, and supporting services became inaccessible. This highlighted a growing contradiction: although data and consensus layers may be distributed, the tools that users interact with are often hosted centrally.
Experts note that the convenience, scalability, and global reach of cloud platforms make them hard to replace, especially for startups without the resources to build and maintain their own infrastructure. “Many Web3 teams use AWS because it’s fast, reliable, and easy to scale — until it’s not,” said one blockchain infrastructure analyst. Click here to read
The incident has reignited discussions about “infrastructure decentralisation” — building alternatives such as peer-to-peer hosting, distributed storage solutions like IPFS, and decentralised cloud providers like Akash and Filecoin. Advocates argue that without tackling these underlying dependencies, Web3 remains vulnerable to the same single points of failure it seeks to eliminate.
Ultimately, the AWS outage serves as a wake-up call: true decentralisation requires more than blockchain technology — it demands rethinking the entire technology stack, from servers and storage to data delivery and user access. Until then, Web3’s dream of independence from centralised control remains, ironically, hosted in someone else’s cloud.
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