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Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a minor outage, but this did not affect the nodes on the Ethereum network, which rely heavily on Amazon hosting.
On June 13, the cloud service provider temporarily went down for about three hours. At 12:08 p.m. PT, the company announced for the first time that it was “investigating an increase in errors and delays” in parts of the United States.
Many mainstream news organizations such as the Associated Press were affected and were unable to publish stories.
Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness oversaw the crash, noting that the Ethereum network was unaffected.
AWS is down
Ethereum is humming along unaffected
Bitcoin maxis hardest hit pic.twitter.com/9YGBXRC4CL
— Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) June 13, 2023
According to Ethernodes, 64.5% of the Ethereum network depends on Amazon hosting providers.
Van Ness added that the impact could be more significant if the shutdown happened in Europe due to the amount of Ether (ETH) wagered on Lido, which currently stands at around 7.1 million or 35% of the total:
“My guess is that if AWS goes down in Europe there will be some effect given how much Lido is in the cloud.”
Ethereum has previously been criticized for being centralized due to its reliance on infrastructure provider Infura, which provides network nodes to companies and organizations. Many of these companies and liquid staking platform Lido rely heavily on AWS for cloud hosting services.
Related: 3 cloud providers account for over two-thirds of Ethereum nodes
Approximately 20 minutes after discovering the issue, AWS stated that the root cause of the issue was related to a service called AWS Lambda, which allows customers to run code for various types of applications.
Three hours after AWS went down, the company reported that “the issue has been resolved and all AWS services are working fine” at 3:37 pm PT.
According to hosting platform Kinsta, AWS has a dominant market share of 34% among cloud hosting providers.