In brief
- A major outage at Amazon Web Services continued to disrupt key crypto platforms on Monday afternoon, including Coinbase, Base, and OpenSea, with issues hitting East Coast users especially hard.
- The downtime even impacted decentralized apps like MetaMask, which use third-party, AWS-dependent services to fetch blockchain data for users.
- While the disruptions highlighted crypto’s reliance on centralized infrastructure, they also drove Ethereum gas fees below 0.1 gwei—a rare, ultra-low level.
As the rest of the internet began to recover Monday afternoon from a seismic Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, key crypto sites and service providers continued to struggle from the setback.
Apps like Coinbase and OpenSea have remained partially or entirely down for many users, particularly those on the East Coast.
Meanwhile, even decentralized crypto wallets like MetaMask have been showing some panicked users zero balances, due to outages at a service provider the wallet depends on to fetch user data from numerous blockchains.
Infura, which connects internet applications to blockchain data, continues to experience outages across the crypto ecosystem. The AWS outage continues to impact its ability to fetch data from blockchains including Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, and Scroll. (Disclaimer: MetaMask and Infura are products of Consensys, one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Base itself—the popular Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase—has also continued to suffer limited network capacity, several hours after the AWS outages were first reported Monday.
After reporting that AWS-related issues on the network had been resolved on Monday afternoon, the network’s status page then returned to an error signal shortly thereafter, citing transaction-related latencies and inconsistencies in block production times.
Coinbase has also continued to struggle to regain full functionality for all customers, even as other crypto trading platforms impacted by the AWS outage, including Robinhood, have managed to do so.
On Monday afternoon, the company said it was aware that customers were still “unable to use many core functions of Coinbase,” including trading and transfers, due to AWS-related issues.
NFT marketplace OpenSea has also experienced sustained problems due to the outage. While the company CTO, Chris Maddern, emphasized that while OpenSea itself is up, many “upstream providers” the site depends on continue to experience major issues, leading to intermittent site unavailability for users and a higher than usual fail rate.
Maddern said he anticipated the issues would persist for several more hours as of Monday afternoon.
While many crypto users have found Monday’s events frustrating—or even hypocritical, given the apparent dependence of decentralization-touting crypto companies on centralized providers like Amazon—there was some small silver lining for those able to conduct on-chain transactions.
Due largely to the day’s events, average gas fees on Ethereum plummeted to a near-unheard-of low of less than 0.1 gwei, according to Etherscan. That figure, at a tiny fraction of a cent, is less than a tenth of yesterday’s prices—and less than 1% of average transaction costs on the network just months ago.
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