DynamoDB Bug Causes AWS Outage, Disrupts Crypto

A major AWS outage in October 2025 centered on the US‑EAST‑1 Virginia region disrupted numerous crypto platforms and thousands of websites and apps worldwide, generating over 16 million Downdetector reports and affecting more than 2,000 services. Amazon traced the incident to a software bug in DynamoDB’s automated DNS management system that impacted the region. The outage interrupted services for centralized exchanges, web wallets, DeFi apps and infrastructure providers — including Coinbase, Base, Robinhood and Infura — and affected layer‑2 networks and other chains with many nodes on AWS, while major layer‑1 networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum continued operating. In response, Amazon introduced a CloudWatch incident-report generation tool to automate post‑incident analysis and made it available across multiple regions, including US East. The event underscored the crypto sector’s heavy reliance on a few cloud providers and renewed calls for more resilient, decentralized infrastructure. Industry voices, including Base’s Xen Baynham‑Herd, warned that building decentralized infrastructure capable of rivaling centralized cloud services will likely take years.