AWS Outage Disrupts Crypto Exchanges, Exposing Centralized Risks
On April 15, 2025, a power failure at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center froze withdrawals and trading on major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC, rattling the $45 billion daily crypto market. The hour-long outage, from 12:40 A.M. to 1:43 A.M. PDT, exposed the fragility of centralized infrastructure underpinning fintech—a wake-up call for an industry built on decentralization.
This isn’t AWS’s first disruption. In December 2024, an outage in the us-east-1 region hit services like IMDb, while earlier incidents have disrupted financial markets, often due to human error or natural disasters. The latest failure, caused by simultaneous power losses in AWS’s primary and backup systems, affected 15…
