When Amazon Crashed, "Decentralized" Blockchain went Down With it

The October 2025 AWS outage revealed blockchain's dirty secret: despite claims of decentralization, 37% of Ethereum nodes and 70% of RPC traffic rely on centralized providers like AWS, Infura, and Alchemy. When AWS crashed for 14-16 hours, users couldn't access blockchains even though protocols kept running. The "bootstrap trap" forces new chains into expensive centralized services, creating censorship risks and innovation bottlenecks. Projects like Lava Network, Pocket Network, and Ankr are racing to build merit-based, decentralized infrastructure before the next outage strikes.