One AWS Outage Shouldn't Break the Internet

The internet's reliance on a handful of cloud providers has created a fragile foundation. It's time to rebuild.

Three companies control roughly two-thirds of the world's cloud infrastructure. Last month, we saw what that concentration actually means. 

When Amazon Web Services experienced connectivity issues at its Northern Virginia data center, the effects rippled far beyond AWS customers. Coinbase went down. Robinhood trades failed. Reddit, McDonald's ordering systems, and Fortnite servers all went offline. One regional issue at one provider triggered a cascade that touched millions of users across unrelated industries.

Although this sounds like a sophisticated attack or an unprecedented disaster, it was an ordinary technical problem made extraordinary by how much of our digital world depends on so few points of failure.

The Concentration Problem

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively dominate the global cloud infrastructure market. Major financial platforms, healthcare systems, and critical services all depend on these three providers. When AWS experiences issues—as it did in April and again in October—the cascading effects ripple across industries.

And there's a certain irony in cryptocurrency exchanges going dark because Amazon's servers had a bad day. Cryptocurrency is an industry built on the premise of decentralization. Yet when the October AWS outage hit, Coinbase, the third-largest centralized exchange by trading volume, saw users locked out of their accounts and unable to withdraw funds. How are users supposed to reconcile with having assets designed to operate without intermediaries rendered inaccessible because of dependence on a centralized cloud provider?

It would be wrong to ignore this outage as if it were a mere glitch. We need to accept it as a sign that too much depends on a single provider in a single location. These are single points of failure at a civilizational scale. In the event of an actual coordinated attack or unfavorable policy change, millions of people should not be prevented from accessing services they depend on daily.

Beyond Patches and Promises

The industry's current response to these challenges might call for better APIs, improved monitoring, and multi-region redundancy, but this amounts to rearranging deck chairs on a ship with no guarantee of seaworthiness. These approaches maintain the centralized control points that remain fundamentally vulnerable to exploitation, data breaches, and service disruptions.

What we need is a change to the internet's architecture. The internet was originally designed as a distributed network precisely because its creators understood that centralized systems are fragile systems. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that lesson.

Blockchain technology which is truly decentralized offers a fundamentally different approach. By distributing computation across a network of independent nodes it eliminates the single points of failure that will always be a massive risk with centralized systems. When one node goes down, the network continues operating. Blockchain networks like Bitcoin demonstrated that a well-designed blockchain can be entrusted to securely hold trillions of dollars in value. In networks like these, there's no off switch, no central point of control, and no easy way to disrupt service. For essential services, this is a must-have.

What Decentralized Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Decentralized cloud infrastructure is being built and deployed today, which provides compute, storage, and hosting that is distributed across independent data centers worldwide. Networks like the Internet Computer, Filecoin, and other decentralized compute and storage protocols already show what this model looks like in practice. Applications running on this infrastructure don't experience "outages" in the traditional sense because there's no central server to fail.

The benefits of must-have infrastructure extend beyond resilience. Decentralized systems offer guarantees that centralized providers are architecturally incapable of delivering. Data integrity becomes verifiable through cryptographic proofs, such that every transaction and state change is recorded on a public ledger that anyone can audit. This data is public, but sensitive information can be processed without exposing the underlying data, thanks to techniques like threshold cryptography, where computations happen across multiple nodes without any single party ever seeing the complete picture. And by design, censorship becomes impossible because there's no single administrator who can block access, delete content, or revoke service: the network runs on consensus.

The infrastructure is already being proven at scale: developers are building social networks, chat applications, agentic AI applications, decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, and financial services that operate entirely on truly distributed blockchain infrastructure. These applications can't be taken offline by a single outage, a corporate policy change, or even government intervention. 

The Stakes Are Rising

As AI systems become increasingly critical to healthcare, finance, education, and emergency response, the question of infrastructure resilience needs to become a core one for businesses. An AWS outage today is annoying and a source of extra cost and user friction. An AWS outage when we're dependent on AI for medical diagnosis or infrastructure management would be catastrophic.

Consider the rise of true AI agents, which are systems that can act autonomously and make important decisions. These require infrastructure where the rules of operation are transparent, immutable, and beyond any single entity's control. An AI that relies on centralized servers isn't truly autonomous. For this technology to truly succeed, we need more intelligent infrastructure.

A Call to Action

The October AWS outage was a warning. The future will undoubtedly bring more outages; it's simply a matter of time. The only prevention is to adopt infrastructure designed for resilience from the ground up.

Even Bitcoin, the original decentralized network, is seeing a wave of new applications built on infrastructure that doesn't need to touch AWS at all. More and more decentralized exchanges are processing millions in volume, with lending protocols running entirely on-chain. Developers are proving that you can build fast, user-friendly applications without handing the keys to AWS.

The technology exists to make the internet work the way most people already assume it does: distributed and resilient. We haven't bothered to use it at scale, but the October outage was a reminder that we're overdue to start.

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About the Author

Lomesh Dutta is VP of Growth at the DFINITY Foundation, which contributes to the Internet Computer blockchain—a decentralized platform providing compute, storage, and hosting across independent data centers worldwide.