A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) jolted the crypto industry on April 15, disrupting operations at leading centralized exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC, as well as several prominent wallet providers.

The incident reignited a long-standing debate over the sector’s dependence on centralized infrastructure—and reinforced the urgent call for decentralized alternatives.

AWS Outage Paralyzes Top Crypto Exchanges

The AWS data center outage triggered widespread connectivity issues, affecting at least 12 AWS services and leaving major crypto platforms scrambling.

Binance was among the first to report disruptions, warning users on X that some orders were failing and advising them to retry transactions. In its post, Binance stated that it was aware of the network interruption, actively working to resolve the issue, and would provide updates shortly.

Another crypto exchange, KuCoin, also took to X to report service disruptions caused by the AWS outage. In a notice to users, KuCoin explained that the large-scale network failure had led to temporary platform-wide disruptions. Despite the chaos, the exchange assured users that their assets remained fully secure.

At least eight major exchanges and wallet providers—including Coinstore, Gate.io, DeBank, Rabby Wallet, and Weex—reported AWS-related service issues. Most platforms restored normal operations by 1:50 p.m. UTC, with DeBank being a notable exception.

AWS—long considered the backbone for many of the world’s largest crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Crypto.com, Huobi, BitMEX, and Kraken—is valued for its ability to handle high transaction volumes with low latency. However, this incident underscores the risks of relying on a single centralized cloud provider, where one point of failure can cascade across the entire ecosystem.

Industry Leaders Call for Decentralized Solutions

The AWS outage has sparked renewed calls for the adoption of decentralized infrastructure that eliminates single points of failure.

“AWS down and 90% of crypto is down. Decentralization is a meme,” remarked Edmund Chua, head of mETH Protocol, highlighting the irony of the situation. Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, echoed the sentiment: “AWS data center issues impacted several CEXs—no need to panic. It’s a solid reminder: Maybe it’s time to explore decentralized cloud services.”

Decentralized alternatives are already gaining traction. Projects like Filecoin offer decentralized storage, Akash Network provides a decentralized computing marketplace, and Render Network delivers decentralized GPU compute services. These emerging solutions aim to eliminate centralized choke points and strengthen the resilience of the crypto ecosystem.