Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Services, but Ethereum Network Stays Strong

Jimmy Aki
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a brief disruption of about three hours, leading to disturbances on multiple websites and services. 

Surprisingly, the Ethereum network remained unaffected during this outage, despite its huge dependence on AWS hosting. 

However, many observers suggest that existential problems could arise in the future due to Ethereum’s reliance on Lido for staking.

Ethereum Thrives Despite Reliance on AWS Hosting

A major disturbance shook the tech industry on June 13th as Amazon Web Services (AWS), a popular cloud computing platform, encountered a substantial outage.

The outage affected various online services and platforms, causing inconvenience to businesses and users worldwide. 

AWS is notable for its reliability and scalability in providing cloud infrastructure to several businesses and organizations. 

However, the most robust systems guarantee excellent resistance to technical glitches and unforeseen issues.

At 12:08 p.m. PDT, AWS initially detected higher error rates and latencies in certain areas of the United States, prompting them to launch investigations into the problem. 

This disruption persisted for about three hours, causing many popular platforms and services heavily reliant on AWS to experience disruptions. 

Streaming services, e-commerce websites, and mainstream news organizations like the Associated Press suffered downtime that hampered the publication of articles during that period.

However, the Ethereum network stood strong and remained resilient amidst the chaos.

Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform known for its smart contract functionality and support for various decentralized applications (dApps). 

Evan Van Ness, a proponent of the Ethereum network, observed the situation and confirmed that the outage did not affect its functionality. 

This is remarkable because a considerable portion of the Ethereum network, approximately 64.5%, according to Ethernodes, relies on hosting providers like Amazon.

Meanwhile, Van Ness highlighted the severity of the outage if it had happened in Europe because of the significant amount of Ether (ETH) staked on Lido. 

Lido (LDO) is a solution for liquid staking that enables proof-of-stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies, including the post-Ethereum Merge consensus layer (formerly known as Ethereum 2.0), to be staked.

Currently, Lido holds around 7.1 million ETH, which accounts for 35% of the total supply.

This incident raised concerns about the level of centralization within the Ethereum ecosystem, given its heavy dependence on infrastructure providers like AWS and the liquid staking platform Lido.

Amazon Fixes Its AWS Services

AWS identified the underlying problem and revealed after about 20 minutes of its discovery that the root cause of the issue is connected to Lambda.

This problem resulted in errors that directly affected customers, including those using API Gateway, and indirectly impacted other AWS services.

AWS Lambda is a service that enables customers to execute code for various applications.

Following a comprehensive investigation and diligent resolution endeavors, AWS officially declared the successful resolution of the problem at 3:37 p.m. PDT, thereby restoring normal operations.

As per Kinsta, AWS has a market dominance of 34% in the cloud computing space.

AWS is the preferred hosting service for many global enterprises and popular corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and the BBC.

According to the latest data from BuiltWith, approximately 9,054,410 live websites are hosted on the platform, surpassing the entire population of Switzerland.

Analyzing AWS’s quarterly and annual reports from the past decade reveals an extraordinary tale of growth.

Over seven years, the platform’s revenue has increased by more than tenfold, rising from $3.1 billion in 2013 to over $35 billion in 2019. 

The revenue growth of AWS has been consistently strong to date.

This remarkable trajectory demonstrates that a cloud platform can significantly grow from a billion-dollar enterprise to a hundred-billion-dollar business.

About Jimmy Aki PRO INVESTOR

Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.