A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on April 16 temporarily disrupted operations across several leading crypto exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC, prompting user complaints and delays in trading, deposits, and withdrawals.
The disruption began in the early hours of the day, affecting key AWS infrastructure components relied upon by many crypto platforms to maintain real-time operations. Binance acknowledged a “temporary issue” impacting its peer-to-peer (P2P) trading service and said its team was working to restore full functionality.
KuCoin similarly reported technical difficulties, attributing the problem to an AWS network fluctuation. The exchange noted that services were recovering gradually as AWS resolved the root cause.
MEXC also confirmed that AWS network instability led to service interruptions, particularly for account-related operations and order processing. The exchange later updated users that systems were returning to normal.
Other platforms and blockchain services reported brief service degradation during the incident, underlining the crypto industry’s widespread reliance on centralized cloud providers like AWS. While the disruption was short-lived, it reignited concerns about single points of failure and the need for more resilient infrastructure in the digital asset ecosystem.
AWS has not yet provided full details on the cause of the outage, but confirmed that recovery processes were underway for affected regions. Crypto platforms have since restored services, though some users have reported lingering issues.
The incident underscores the vulnerabilities inherent in centralized dependencies and has sparked renewed calls within the industry to explore decentralized hosting and redundancy solutions to safeguard against future service interruptions.
