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The October 20, 2025 AWS outage exposed the fragility of centralized systems, underscoring the urgent need for web3 to embrace truly distributed, resilient infrastructure.
Summary
- A routine AWS update caused widespread failures across apps, gaming platforms, banking services, and parts of the crypto ecosystem, revealing a single point of failure in critical infrastructure.
- Web3’s reliance on a few centralized cloud providers threatens the very decentralization it champions, risking downtime and trust whenever a region goes offline.
- Distributed, redundant hardware and proactive engineering, as implemented by NOWNodes, can absorb failures and maintain service continuity, making infrastructure itself a foundation of trust.
On October 20, 2025, the internet faltered. For hours, countless apps, platforms, and services simply stopped working. Fortnite froze. Snapchat crashed. Alexa went silent. Even major banking and trading apps were down.
The cause wasn’t a cyberattack or a hack; it was a routine software update gone wrong in Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region, one of the most relied-upon pieces of digital infrastructure on the planet.
A small configuration change led to DNS failures that rippled across the global web, breaking everything from gaming to financial services to parts of the crypto ecosystem.
It was a moment of silence and a reminder that the “cloud” isn’t some ethereal, distributed network. It’s a collection of data centers owned by a few companies. And when one of them sneezes, the internet catches a cold.
For most of the world, the outage was an inconvenience. For web3, it was an existential warning.
Centralized convenience, decentralized illusions
The modern internet runs on convenience. Platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have made it much easier for companies to scale. Startups don’t need to buy racks of servers or run th
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Author: Shylin Sam
