thereum Remained Operational While AWS Experienced Outage in the US

Impact of AWS Outage on Ethereum Network Nodes

On June 13, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a minor outage, causing temporary disruptions. Despite AWS being a major hosting provider for Ethereum network nodes, the outage did not affect their operations.

During the incident, which lasted for approximately three hours, AWS reported increased error rates and latencies in certain regions of the United States. Mainstream news organizations, including the Associated Press, were among those affected, leading to a halt in article publications.

Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness closely observed the outage and noted that the Ethereum network remained unaffected. This highlights the network’s resilience and ability to operate independently even when relying on AWS hosting services.

According to Ethernodes, an estimated 64.5% of the Ethereum network depends on Amazon hosting providers. While this dependency is significant, the impact of the outage would have been even more substantial if it had occurred in Europe. This is due to the substantial amount of Ether (ETH) staked on Lido, which currently stands at around 7.1 million (approximately 35% of the total) with a value of $1,746 per ETH.

Van Ness further emphasized the potential consequences of an AWS outage in Europe, considering the extensive utilization of cloud services by Lido and other companies within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Ethereum has faced criticism in the past for centralization concerns related to its reliance on infrastructure provider Infura, which supplies network nodes to various companies and organizations. Many of these entities, including the liquid staking platform Lido, heavily rely on AWS for cloud hosting services.

Approximately 20 minutes after the issue was discovered, AWS identified the root cause as a problem with AWS Lambda, a service that enables customers to run code for different applications. Eventually, after more than three hours, AWS announced that the problem was resolved, and all AWS services were operating normally again at 3:37 PM PDT.

Market analysis from hosting platform Kinsta reveals that AWS holds the dominant market share among cloud hosting providers, accounting for 34% of the market.