AWS and Microsoft Cloud Disruptions Trigger Confusion Across Crypto Markets Despite Conflicting Official Statements

Back-to-back infrastructure incidents reveal how crypto’s reliance on centralized cloud services can still shake decentralized ecosystems

TL;DR

• Over 5,000 users reported AWS service failures, while Microsoft Azure confirmed simultaneous downtime.
• AWS denied any outage despite mass reports of login errors, latency, and API delays affecting crypto platforms.
• The event reignited debate about the crypto market’s dependence on centralized cloud providers.

Reports of a second major AWS outage within a week rippled through the internet on October 29, 2025, sparking concern among traders and developers who depend on cloud infrastructure to keep crypto platforms running. Around 5,000 users flagged connection issues on Downdetector between noon and 2 p.m. UTC, with the majority of reports clustering in New York, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore. Complaints described API timeouts, login errors, and delays across multiple DeFi platforms, leading many to assume another large-scale AWS malfunction was underway.

AWS swiftly dismissed the claims, telling reporters that all systems were “operating normally.” Company engineers pointed to potential local ISP disruptions and DNS misconfigurations as possible explanations for the errors. Despite the denial, network monitoring dashboards from independent analytics firms recorded short-term latency spikes in U.S. East and EU Central regions, enough to trigger cascading service failures for dependent applications.

While AWS insisted it was unaffected, Microsoft confirmed concurrent issues with its Azure platform, which powers enterprise and fintech systems globally. Azure users experienced a 35–50 minute outage that impacted Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, with Microsoft attributing the disruption to a faulty DNS configuration update. Cloud tracking service Pingdom noted that connectivity resumed around 13:50 UTC. The timing overlap between AWS and Microsoft failures led analysts to speculate about shared backbone dependencies across major internet routing systems.

Several crypto-related services relying on AWS-hosted nodes—such as Uniswap, Aave, MetaMask, and OpenSea—encountered delays or limited functionality during the reported outage window. Some protocols temporarily paused transaction interfaces or rerouted through Cloudflare nodes to maintain uptime. Chainlink oracles reportedly experienced heartbeat interruptions lasting up to six minutes, temporarily affecting data updates for certain DeFi contracts.

The market reaction was muted but noticeable. Bitcoin’s crypto price index slipped 0.8% before recovering, while Ethereum and Solana showed similar intraday swings. Trading volumes on certain exchanges dipped as API connections faltered, yet the broader coin market cap remained steady once systems stabilized. Analysts interpreted the event less as a market catalyst and more as an infrastructure stress test for the crypto ecosystem’s reliance on Web2 service providers.

Developers and security analysts underscored how “shadow dependencies”—third-party apps indirectly tied to AWS or Azure—can amplify the scale of minor network hiccups. A DNS delay at Route 53, AWS’s domain service, can cause cascading outages even when AWS’s internal dashboards report normal performance. Despite AWS’s statement, perception on social media diverged sharply, with hashtags like #AWSDown and #Web3Reliance trending as frustrated users questioned the transparency of centralized cloud providers.

Cybersecurity consultant Ethan Wu noted that decentralization should extend beyond finance itself: “The crypto market’s resilience depends on decentralizing not just assets, but the infrastructure that runs it.” Chainflow’s Leah Zhou echoed the sentiment, emphasizing that “we’ve rebuilt the same centralized internet on different rails.” Their comments reflected a broader frustration within the Web3 community that decentralization often ends at the user interface layer, while the back-end still runs on corporate servers.

Historical patterns only deepened this skepticism. AWS has previously suffered outages in December 2021 and June 2023, both of which disrupted exchanges and NFT marketplaces. Despite repeated lessons, the industry continues to favor the stability and scalability of centralized cloud providers over fully decentralized hosting alternatives like Filecoin, IPFS, or Akash Network—services that, notably, reported zero downtime during this week’s incident.

By evening, both AWS and Microsoft restored all affected services, but the perception damage lingered. The event reignited discussions about whether crypto can claim to be decentralized when most of its operational backbone depends on two major corporations. As market observers put it, the latest outage confusion highlighted that while decentralized finance may remove intermediaries from money, it still depends on centralized internet infrastructure to exist. The irony wasn’t lost on traders watching crypto price feeds freeze while the world’s largest cloud providers argued over whether anything had gone wrong at all.

This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.