A major outage on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech giant’s cloud computing platform that supports vast swaths of the internet, threw the cryptocurrency community into chaos on Monday.
The irony of communities that pride themselves on being decentralized being taken down by a centralized failure wasn’t lost on users on social media. As Cointribune reports, entire crypto trading platforms were affected by the outage, causing service disruptions for hours.
Even OpenSea, the biggest exchange of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), was hit hard. A screenshot shared by podcaster and Onion social media editor June Sternbach shows broken images of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection on OpenSea. The images of unbothered-looking primates was once a highly coveted possession among the crypto-obsessed and high-profile celebrities, while being valued at millions of dollars worth of Ethereum each. Since then, their value has cratered, changing hands for around $30,000 these days.
“Cannot load image,” a notice overlaying the apes reads. “This ERC-721 NFT is not accessible due to an ongoing Amazon Web Services outage.”
It was a painful faceplant, since NFTs are meant to be the unique manifestations of an image that are stored on a blockchain to represent ownership.
“NFTs are amazing because you apparently ‘own’ them, but the AWS outage yesterday took out everyone’s apes lol,” Sternbach wrote in her post.
“As you may have seen online, Amazon AWS is experiencing a severe & extended service degradation,” OpenSea CTO Chris Maddern tweeted on Monday. “Unfortunately, these AWS issues are ongoing, and we expect to continue to see issues for the next few hours.”
Apart from OpenSea, the leading US crypto exchange Coinbase, as well as trading platform Robinhood also experienced connectivity issues due to the outage.
“Most people think crypto means ‘decentralization,'” one user tweeted. “But the truth is almost 90 percent of the entire crypto industry runs on one company: Amazon Web Services.”
“It’s cheap, fast, and easy which is why everyone uses it,” the user explained. “That same convenience creates a massive single point of failure. When AWS breaks, the entire crypto world breaks with it.”
