AWS Outage Takes Down Coinbase
Olivia Capozzalo & Denis Omelchenko
October 20, 2025
Happy Monday, Defiers
Today’s big story:
- This morning’s AWS outage knocked out major crypto services — with some, like Coinbase, still not fully recovered
In other news:
- Stripe’s Tempo blockchain raises $500M
- Ondo urges SEC to delay Nasdaq’s tokenization plans
- Is TradFi’s growing interest in Ethereum a good thing? Experts weigh in
- Let’s build open highways, not railroads [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
We are thrilled to launch Ecosystems, a new series from The Defiant that dives deep into today’s most innovative blockchain networks and protocols. Our first limited series explores whether Avalanche can break the tradeoff between speed, cost, and decentralization with sub-second finality and custom Layer 1s.
Hosts Camila Russo and Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo lead insightful conversations with Emin Gün Sirer, Nicholas Mussallem, and Hilmar Maximilian Orth to uncover how this technology could deliver on its ambitious promises.
We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today
📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $110,956 | 2.37 % |
 | Ethereum | $4,026.92 | 0.90 % |
 | BNB | $1,102.58 | -1.45 % |
 | XRP | $2.46 | 1.89 % |
 | Solana | $191.11 | -0.13 % |
Today’s Big Story
AWS Outage Shows Crypto’s Dependence on Centralized Cloud Services — Again
Many in the crypto community experienced déjà vu this morning, as much of the internet once again collapsed like a house of cards when an Amazon Web Services outage knocked out everything from Snapchat and Fortnite to Signal, Base, Coinbase, and Robinhood, exposing just how fragile even major services are when they rely on a single, centralized cloud provider.
On its status page today, Oct. 20, Base warned that AWS was having a “major outage that is affecting Base infrastructure.” The outage lasted about an hour before being fixed, with submissions resuming and transaction capacity returning to normal, Base said.
But the outage wasn’t limited to Base. Coinbase itself — one of the industry’s oldest CEXs, and the largest in the U.S. — reported on X this morning that its services were not working for “many users”: “We're aware many users are currently unable to access Coinbase due to an AWS outage.” As of its latest updates on X, Coinbase has yet to fully resolve the issue.
Robinhood also reportedly experienced service disruptions this morning because of the AWS outage. In addition, self-custodial neobank Tria reported issues, while USDT0, an omnichain version of Tether’s USDT stablecoin, faced delays in transactions, and users trying to bridge funds between Base and Ethereum on LayerZero were reportedly blocked too.
Even Consensys’ Infura, a blockchain infrastructure hub, saw a “widespread outage affecting multiple Infura networks and services, including both JSON-RPC and WebSocket endpoints.”
According to the platform’s status page, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Linea, Base, and Scroll, all had JSON-RPC-related issues on Infura, meaning that developers using Infura for their apps got stuck.
Amazon acknowledged higher error rates and slower response times during the outage, which quickly cascaded into downstream apps and services.
Not the First Time
Today’s outage isn’t the first time this has happened this year alone. Back in April, a similar AWS connectivity problem disrupted CEX giants Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC, causing failed orders, inaccurate charts, and delayed transfers, The Defiant reported at the time.
Back then, experts interviewed by The Defiant warned that despite blockchain and DeFi rhetoric, the ecosystem is still heavily dependent on centralized cloud providers. Ethereum and Solana nodes, for instance, remain largely hosted on AWS.
Dr. Max Li, founder and CEO of OORT, the data cloud for decentralized AI, noted today in commentary to The Defiant that the latest outage “highlights why decentralized solutions are essential,” adding that decentralized cloud computing offers a “powerful alternative by distributing data and processing across a network, reducing the risk of single points of failure that can lead to complete service disruptions."
But the once overhyped DePIN sector is also still “in its earliest innings” with less than <0.1% market share, analysts at Messari noted in last year’s report on the sector.
So until the crypto industry figures out how to make decentralized infrastructure standard, users will likely keep feeling the effects of a web2 world that’s still tightly interconnected.
Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant
Forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe for daily insights and curated news from The Defiant team, Monday-Saturday. It’s free.
🎬WATCH
The AI CEO Era: Breaking Build Bottlenecks with Vibe Coding | Ahmad Shadid
In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Vinny sits down with Ahmad Shadid —former quant trader turned founder — who redirected the 2022 GPU crunch into a decentralized GPU network and now leads a bold push toward “sovereign superintelligence”: an AI CEO framework that can govern, fund, and scale itself transparently.
The conversation covers how zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized networks could reshape AI, and why security must keep pace in a world moving faster than audits. We talk leadership, the democratization of software, and the next wave of founders shipping products in days — not months.
Top News in the Past 24 Hours
- Stripe-Backed Tempo Blockchain Raises $500 Million in Series A Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm, has raised $500 million in a Series A round led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. Why it matters: The massive round highlights growing institutional confidence in stablecoins and corporate-backed blockchains.
- Ondo Finance Urges SEC to Delay Nasdaq Tokenization Plan Over Transparency Concerns The DeFi firm has published an open letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asking the agency to delay approval of Nasdaq’s plan to trade tokenized securities until more details are revealed. Why it matters: Ondo warned that moving forward without transparency on how the DTC will settle tokenized stock transactions could give larger financial institutions an unfair edge.
- FEATURE: Is Institutional Adoption Ethereum’s ‘Worst Enemy’? This year, Ethereum firmly broke into the TradFi limelight, with more and more capital flowing into ETFs and DATs; Experts consider the question: is that a good thing for DeFi’s largest chain? Why it matters: Some commentators fear that traditional finance could tame the network’s open, cypherpunk spirit.
Trending on The Defiant
- Stripe-Backed Tempo Blockchain Raises $500 Million in Series A
- Ondo Finance Urges SEC to Delay Nasdaq Tokenization Plan Over Transparency Concerns
- Launch Coin Falls Over 30% as Developers Abandon Current Token Model
- Stablecoins Power $670 Billion in On-Chain Loans: Visa
That’s it for today — if you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends! https://thedefiant.io/subscribe
