On June 13, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a minor outage for approximately three hours in parts of the United States. The Ethereum network, which is heavily dependent on Amazon’s hosting, surprisingly remained unaffected. According to Ethernodes, 64.5% of the Ethereum network relies on Amazon hosting providers.
The impact could have been more significant if the outage occurred in Europe due to the substantial amount of Ether staked on Lido, currently around 7.1 million or 35% of the total. Ethereum has faced criticism in the past for its centralization, given its reliance on infrastructure provider Infura, which supplies network nodes to various companies and organizations. Many of these companies, along with liquid staking platform Lido, heavily rely on AWS for cloud hosting services.
The root cause of the AWS outage was connected to a service called AWS Lambda, which enables customers to run code for various types of applications. Around three hours after the outage, AWS reported that the issue had been resolved, and all services were functioning normally once again.
AWS dominates the cloud hosting market, with a 34% market share, according to Kinsta. This incident raises questions about the potential risks and consequences associated with Ethereum’s reliance on AWS. On one hand, AWS provides a reliable and scalable infrastructure for the network. On the other hand, the outage exemplifies the potential fragility of such reliance, and the concentration of services within centralized cloud hosting providers could become a point of failure for decentralized networks.
It is worth noting that different regions may be more or less vulnerable to outages due to variations in stake distributions and network providers. In this case, the outage did not affect Ethereum, but future incidents could potentially have more significant consequences on blockchain networks.
This AWS outage serves as a reminder for the crypto community to assess and evaluate the potential risks associated with reliance on centralized hosting providers. It also underscores the importance of developing decentralized technologies and infrastructures to create more resilient networks. While the overall impact of this outage was minimal, future incidents might not be so fortunate, and continuing to build out decentralized solutions will be critical for the long-term viability of networks like Ethereum.
Source: Cointelegraph
