The recent AWS major outage has caused a significant disruption to a part of the Internet, impacting giants like Coinbase, Snapchat, Lloyds Bank, and the UK tax portal due to operational issues on the East Coast of the United States.
Coinbase, Perplexity, and the BASE Blockchain in the Dark
The cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a widespread outage on Monday, paralyzing a portion of the Internet for several hours. The incident affected thousands of applications and sites worldwide, including Coinbase, Snapchat, Lloyds Bank, and the British tax portal HMRC.
AWS confirmed an ‘operational issue’ affecting ‘multiple services’ in its flagship East Coast region, a crucial area for hosting a large part of the global web.
In the crypto realm, the impact was immediately felt. Coinbase reported access issues for some users directly linked to the AWS outage. The same was true for BASE, the blockchain developed by Coinbase, which stated on X (formerly Twitter): ‘AWS is experiencing a major outage affecting the BASE infrastructure.’
Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, was also hit hard. Its founder, Aravind Srinivas, admitted on X that ‘the root cause of the problem comes from AWS’ and that teams were actively working on getting back online.
An Alarming Dependence on the Cloud
This outage starkly reminds us of how much of the web relies on a handful of cloud players. AWS, the global leader ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, hosts not only commercial services and popular applications but also critical infrastructures of businesses and governments.
When one of these pillars falters, the effects ripple out: blocked emails, inaccessible banking websites, interrupted data exchanges. In a matter of minutes, the global digital economy seizes up.
The Heart of Amazon’s Business Under Pressure
AWS remains Amazon’s profitability engine, with the group investing billions of dollars to build data centers for the training and deployment of AI applications. A outage of this magnitude, even if temporary, tarnishes its image of absolute reliability, a key selling point against Microsoft and Google.
AWS engineers claim they were immediately mobilized to mitigate the incident and identify the root cause. Hours later, most services were gradually restored, without the company yet specifying the exact origin of the malfunction.
A Warning for the Digital Ecosystem
In a context where AI, DeFi, and critical infrastructures increasingly rely on the cloud, this outage serves as a warning. Behind the promise of efficiency and near-infinite scale, centralization remains a Achilles’ heel. A unique vulnerability capable of reminding the entire ecosystem of the fragility of an Internet dependent on a single actor in just a few hours.
