A widespread service disruption across the cryptocurrency sector has revealed the industry’s critical dependence on centralized cloud infrastructure, challenging its core decentralization principles. Multiple major platforms including Coinbase, Robinhood, and MetaMask experienced simultaneous outages when Amazon Web Services encountered DNS resolution issues in its US-EAST-1 region. The failure affected Infura, the Consensys-supported infrastructure service that connects MetaMask to blockchain networks, causing complete service interruptions for Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, and Scroll layer-2 networks. While Ethereum and Bitcoin continued producing blocks uninterrupted, users found themselves locked out of decentralized finance applications due to their reliance on centralized access points. This incident marks the second major AWS-related outage within six months, following a similar disruption in April 2025 that affected Binance, KuCoin, MEXC, Gate.io, and multiple other platforms. Industry analysis shows that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively control 63% of the global cloud infrastructure market, including the majority of crypto’s supposedly decentralized ecosystem. Notably, the XRP Ledger maintained normal operations during both AWS outages, demonstrating the resilience achievable through properly distributed validation nodes across multiple cloud providers and independent servers. This contrast highlights the gap between marketing claims and technical reality in many crypto projects. The economic incentives driving centralization are clear: AWS offers 99.99% uptime guarantees at minimal cost compared to the expensive hardware, technical expertise, and maintenance required for self-hosted infrastructure. However, this convenience comes with hidden costs, including vulnerability to single points of failure and compliance with US Cloud Act provisions that grant government access to data regardless of physical location. While decentralized alternatives like Filecoin, IPFS, Arweave, and Akash Network exist, adoption remains limited due to developer familiarity with established cloud providers and the significant cost differential. The industry now faces a critical choice between continuing to prioritize convenience over sovereignty or investing in the distributed infrastructure necessary to deliver on its decentralization promises.