Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a brief outage, which had minimal impact on Ethereum network nodes despite their heavy reliance on Amazon’s hosting infrastructure.
On June 13, AWS encountered a temporary service disruption lasting approximately three hours. At 12:08 pm PDT, the company acknowledged “increased error rates and latencies” in certain regions of the United States and initiated an investigation.
Various mainstream news organizations, including the Associated Press, faced difficulties and were unable to publish articles during this period. However, Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness observed that the Ethereum network remained unaffected. According to Ethernodes, approximately 64.5% of the Ethereum network relies on Amazon hosting providers, and only a small portion may have experienced disruption due to the localized nature of the outage. Nevertheless, this substantial dependence on AWS raises concerns about the network’s decentralization, and a more widespread disruption would have had a significant impact on Ethereum.
Van Ness also highlighted that the impact would have been more pronounced if the outage had occurred in Europe, as a significant amount of Ether (ETH) is staked on Lido, with around 7.1 million ETH, equivalent to 35% of the total, being stored in the cloud: “If AWS experienced downtime in Europe, I imagine there would be some effect given how much of Lido relies on cloud infrastructure.”
Ethereum has faced criticism in the past regarding centralization concerns arising from its reliance on infrastructure provider Infura, which supplies network nodes to companies and organizations. Many of these entities, along with the liquid staking platform Lido, heavily depend on AWS for cloud hosting services.
