Northern Virginia, U.S. Leading trading platforms Coinbase and Robinhood experienced widespread service disruptions on Monday following an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center outage, exposing the growing vulnerability of centralized cloud infrastructure used by financial platforms.
The disruption originated in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, where Amazon reported “increased error rates and latencies” across multiple services. Coinbase’s mobile and Base applications were both impacted, preventing users from logging in, placing orders, and withdrawing funds.
Coinbase posted a similar update on X (formerly Twitter), noting that some users had regained access while the team continued to address the issue “with top priority.”
Although no other major crypto exchanges reported outages, multiple Robinhood users complained about trade execution delays and API errors. The widespread impact was echoed online, with crypto trader Kushy posting, Amazon down, Robinhood down, Reddit down, McDonald’s down, Fortnite down.
Second major AWS outage in six months
This is the second major AWS outage since April, when “connectivity issues” caused disruptions across at least eight crypto exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin, MEXC, Gate.io, and DeBank. That incident affected over a dozen AWS services globally, according to Amazon’s post-event report.
AWS serves as the backbone for many centralized cryptocurrency exchanges that require low-latency infrastructure to manage massive trading volumes. However, repeated outages have intensified scrutiny over the risks of relying on a single cloud provider.
Push for decentralized cloud infrastructure
The repeated disruptions have reignited interest in decentralized cloud networks as a potential solution to avoid single points of failure.
Vanar Chain, a Layer-1 blockchain project, is among those pioneering decentralized cloud systems. Following the April outage, Vanar launched Neutron, an AI-native blockchain layer offering data compression ratios of up to 500:1, allowing users to store data fully on-chain without intermediaries.
This unlocks entirely new possibilities from fully on-chain file storage to verifying information directly within the data.
Other Web3-based infrastructure projects are advancing similar initiatives. The Internet Computer protocol enables decentralized computing and hosting across a global network of nodes, while Filecoin, Akash Network, and Render Network provide distributed storage and compute solutions aimed at reducing dependency on centralized providers like AWS.