AWS downtime in the US failed to impact Ethereum

By: Michael Wilson

June 15, 2023 3:57 AM

Ethereum was operational during the last AWS outage, but observers warn that its dependence on Lido for staking may present problems in the future.

Although Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a short outage, there was no significant impact on Ethereum network nodes, even though they rely heavily on Amazon's hosting.

The cloud provider experienced an outage that lasted for almost three hours on June 13. The business first reported→ it was "investigating increased error rates and latencies" in regions of the United States at 12:08 p.m. PDT.

Many major news agencies, including the Associated Press, were impacted and were unable to publish articles. Evan Van Ness, an Ethereum enthusiast, saw the outage and noted that the Ethereum network was not affected.

According→ to Ethernodes, Amazon hosting providers are used by 64.5% of the Ethereum network, and only a tiny portion may have been affected due to the localized nature of the outage. Such reliance on AWS is concerning for the network's decentralization, and a much larger outage would have caused a shock to the Ethereum network.

Ethereum node distribution through web service providers. Source: Ethernodes.

Van Ness said that the damage would have been worse if the outage had occurred in Europe because of the amount of Ether (ETH) staked on Lido, which is presently about 7.1 million, or 35% of the total:

"Considering how dependent Lido is on AWS's European infrastructure, you can bet that disruption there would have consequences."

Because it relied on infrastructure supplier Infura, which offers network nodes to businesses and organizations, Ethereum has previously been attacked for centralization. Many of these startups, as well as the liquid staking platform Lido, rely significantly on Amazon Web Services for cloud hosting services.

Approximately 20 minutes after the problem was discovered, AWS stated that the main cause of the problem was linked to a service dubbed AWS Lambda, which allows users to run code for various sorts of applications.

At 3.37 PM PDT, more than three hours after AWS went down, the firm declared that "the issue has been addressed and all AWS Services are running normally."

With a 34% market share, AWS is clearly in the lead among the cloud hosting providers, as reported→ by the Kinsta hosting platform.