AWS Outage Disrupts Crypto Platforms, Slashes Ethereum Fees

The AWS outage triggered a domino effect across the cryptocurrency ecosystem, hitting both centralized exchanges and supposedly decentralized applications with equal force. Coinbase, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, acknowledged that customers remained unable to use many core functions including trading and transfers throughout Monday afternoon. The platform’s struggles persisted even as other affected trading venues like Robinhood managed to restore full functionality, highlighting the uneven impact across the sector.

Perhaps more revealing was the impact on decentralized applications that theoretically shouldn’t depend on centralized infrastructure. MetaMask, the popular non-custodial wallet, displayed zero balances to panicked users because its underlying service provider, Infura, relies on AWS to fetch blockchain data. This dependency chain affected connections to multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, and Scroll, demonstrating how deeply web3 infrastructure remains tethered to traditional cloud services.

The disruption extended to NFT marketplace OpenSea, where CTO Chris Maddern confirmed that while the platform itself remained operational, ‘upstream providers’ continued experiencing major issues. This led to intermittent site unavailability and higher-than-usual failure rates, with Maddern anticipating problems would persist for several more hours. The widespread nature of these failures underscored what many in crypto have long feared—that decentralization claims often mask significant centralized dependencies.

Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, experienced particularly severe technical challenges. After initially reporting that AWS-related issues had been resolved Monday afternoon, the network’s status page quickly reverted to error signals, citing transaction latencies and inconsistencies in block production times. The network continued suffering from limited capacity hours after AWS outages first emerged, raising questions about the resilience of layer-2 scaling solutions during infrastructure crises.

Infura, the critical middleware service that connects internet applications to blockchain data, remained a central point of failure throughout the incident. As a product of Consensys—one of the crypto sector’s most established infrastructure companies—Infura’s AWS dependency created a single point of failure affecting countless decentralized applications. The service’s continued outages highlighted the infrastructure gap between crypto’s decentralized ideals and its practical implementation realities.

East Coast users bore the brunt of the disruptions, with services experiencing particularly severe degradation in that region. The geographical concentration of impact suggests that specific AWS data centers or regional dependencies played a significant role in the cascading failures. This regional vulnerability further complicated recovery efforts as engineers worked to reroute traffic and restore service consistency across affected platforms.

While the outage created frustration and operational headaches across the crypto ecosystem, it produced one notable silver lining for those able to conduct on-chain transactions. Ethereum gas fees plummeted to below 0.1 gwei—a near-unprecedented level representing less than a tenth of previous day’s prices and less than 1% of average transaction costs from just months earlier. According to Etherscan data, this dramatic reduction reflected the sharp decline in network activity as major platforms and services went offline.

The fee collapse provided a rare opportunity for traders and decentralized finance users to execute transactions at minimal cost, though the practical benefit was limited by the simultaneous unavailability of many trading platforms and wallet services. The ultra-low gas prices underscored how dependent Ethereum network fees are on overall ecosystem activity—when major entry points like Coinbase and MetaMask falter, even the most cost-sensitive users struggle to capitalize on favorable conditions.

This pricing anomaly also served as a real-time stress test of Ethereum’s economic model, demonstrating how quickly fee markets can adjust to sudden changes in demand. The sub-0.1 gwei level represents one of the lowest points in Ethereum’s history, occurring during a period when the network should theoretically be experiencing growing adoption and increasing transaction volume. Instead, the AWS dependency revealed how external infrastructure factors can override internal network economics.

The prolonged AWS outage exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in crypto’s technological stack that transcend individual platform failures. The fact that both centralized exchanges like Coinbase and decentralized applications like MetaMask experienced simultaneous disruptions points to concentrated risk in the sector’s underlying infrastructure layer. This dependency on traditional cloud providers represents a significant contradiction for an industry built on principles of decentralization and censorship resistance.

The incident raises urgent questions about infrastructure diversification and redundancy strategies across the crypto sector. While some platforms like Robinhood managed quicker recoveries, the prolonged struggles at Coinbase, Base, and through Infura suggest varying levels of preparedness for cloud provider failures. As crypto continues its march toward mainstream adoption, the need for more resilient, distributed infrastructure becomes increasingly apparent—and potentially commercially valuable for providers who can solve these challenges.

Monday’s events serve as a stark reminder that technological decentralization remains an aspiration rather than a reality for much of the crypto ecosystem. The sector’s dependence on AWS—and the resulting cascade of failures when that single provider experienced issues—highlights the work still needed to build truly resilient decentralized infrastructure. For an industry that positions itself as an alternative to traditional financial systems, reducing single points of failure may be the most pressing technological challenge ahead.