Good day everyone,
I hope you are all having a good day, welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. In this post I will be looking at how network issues at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre impacted cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet providers.
AWS Outage Impacts Binance and KuCoin
An outage at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre impacted Binance and KuCoin as the cryptocurrency exchanges experienced service issues. The outage disrupted exposed the industry's reliance on centralised cloud infrastructure and has sparked the debate once again regarding the need for decentralised alternatives.
According to the AWS Health Dashboard, the issue has since been resolved, but it caused a significant service disruption on the 15th of April. This caused widespread technical difficulties across major crypto exchanges and the incident was noted as a “large-scale network interruption." It temporarily impacted trading functionality and withdrawals which led to an industry-wide pause as centralised platforms scrambled to assess the situation and restore user services.
The dashboard noted that the interruption was caused by "connectivity issues to a subset of EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone (apne1-as4) in the AP-Northeast-1 region." They stated:
"This was the result of an issue in which the primary and secondary power was interrupted to the affected EC2 instances. During this time, customers may also have experienced increased error rates and latencies for instances launched in the affected zone, along with other AWS APIs that use the affected EC2 instances. Engineers were automatically engaged within minutes and immediately began investigating mitigations. We do not expect this issue to recur."
The AP-Northeast-1 region is located in Tokyo, Japan, and has four availability zones. Back in January 2024, the cloud giant announced it would invest more than $15 billion in expanding its cloud computing infrastructure in Japan by 2027. As part of that investment, it was set to expand its data centres in Tokyo and Osaka.
In an update on the 15th of April AWS stated:
“We are seeing initial signs of recovery but continue to monitor and work toward full recovery. Other AWS services are also impacted by this issue, and are also observing recovery. We will provide another update within the next 30-60 minutes.”
The world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, Binance, was one of the first exchanges to inform their users of the issue. They posted on X regarding the issues facing the platform due to a temporary network interruption by an AWS data centre. As part of precautionary measures they suspended withdrawals in an attempt to minimize risk due the outage. Roughly an hour later Binance confirmed that most of their services had recovered and that withdrawals had been reopened.
https://x.com/binance/status/1912057486959644814
Another major crypto exchange, KuCoin, released a similar statement as they cited a “large-scale network outage with AWS services” as the root cause behind its platform disruptions. They made sure to reassure users and continued to emphasise that all funds and data remained secure. They noted their technical team was actively working to resolve the situation.
https://x.com/kucoincom/status/1912078753641206253
There were other exchanges which also reported difficulties related to the issue, including MEXC, Gate.io, Coinstore, Rabby Wallet, and DeBank. Users encountered anomalies like failed order cancellations, abnormal candlestick charts, and delayed asset transfers.
Amazon Web Services powers some of the most popular platforms in the space, including Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Kraken, BitMEX, and Huobi. AWS is known for its stability and capacity to handle large volumes of low-latency transactions, but the disruption showed how there is the potential for an over-reliance on the single service provider. CEO of Bitget, Gracy Chen, noted the issues by stating:
“It’s a solid reminder: maybe it’s time to explore decentralized cloud services.”
The conversation around Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, continues as more projects are looking to promote themselves as decentralized alternatives to traditional infrastructure. While full decentralisation is not always the goal, DePIN’s mission is to enhance legacy systems using decentralized technologies, not to overthrow them.
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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