An AWS Outage Doesn’t Just Impact Web2
On October 20, 2025, many awoke to a digital landscape in disarray. What began as a routine morning quickly devolved into a widespread disruption: Reddit was inaccessible, Snapchat wouldn't load, Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings failed to connect.
Nov 2, 2025
On October 20, 2025, many awoke to a digital landscape in disarray. What began as a routine morning quickly devolved into a widespread disruption: Reddit was inaccessible, Snapchat wouldn't load, Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings failed to connect. From Roblox to Venmo, and even Adobe Creative Cloud software, essential digital services were rendered unusable. This wasn't a localized glitch. It was a global digital paralysis, AWS had gone down, taking down all centralized systems and apps with it, and for many people’s surprise: even decentralized Web3 protocols. Many assumed that this wouldn’t affect Web3 because, in theory, Web3 is fully decentralized. In practice, however, that is not the case. AWS being unreachable inadvertently pulled the curtain back. Users were aghast to find Coinbase had been affected, metamask and other wallets couldn’t submit transactions, Infura was down, L2 blockchains were struggling, NFT images were missing! But, why? AWS S3, being the defacto storage solution for the internet at-large has become an obvious place for dApps to offload the bits that they cannot realistically decentralize. Some common ways that dApps are making use of AWS S3 are:
1. Frontend Hosting
Most dApps host their UIs. If that S3 bucket were to become unavailable, users can’t even access the app. The smart contracts may live on-chain, but interaction with them is instantly halted.
2. Off-Chain Indexing & Metadata
Transaction histories, orderbook states and NFT metadata are routinely stored in S3. While IPFS is often cited as “the standard” for decentralized storage, dApps often still backup (and in many cases fully depend) on S3 for speed and reliability.
3. Rollup & Oracle Infrastructure
Even sophisticated modular stacks like L2 sequencers, indexers and oracles frequently use S3 to store state snapshots, proofs or aggregated feeds before anchoring them on-chain.
It’s Not Really Their Fault
It’s not so much that your favorite dApps have misled you, it’s that they realistically have no choice. They decentralize what they are able to decentralize, which is not everything. The data infrastructure doesn’t exist in Web3 to allow dApps and protocols to decentralize their data fully. Current solutions are geared more towards archival storage. They are slow, inefficient and expensive. On the flipside, centralized solutions like AWS S3 are fast, cheap, scalable and until recently, we believed extremely dependable. dApps are forced to choose between their visions of decentralization and providing the user experience required to be successful. Users demand low-latency, high-throughput, efficient and dependable hot data.
Users Ask and Hyve Delivers
Hyve was purpose built to meet this demand. It delivers S3-compatible, high-throughput decentralized storage engineered for real-time Web3 workloads, where uptime, verifiability, and sovereignty matter.
S3-Compatible Interface: Builders can migrate existing S3 workloads to Hyve with minimal friction, and in a matter of seconds. The familiar API means integration feels native, not experimental.
Decentralized by Design: Data is erasure-coded and distributed across a permissionless network of nodes, secured economically via Symbiotic. No single region, no single operator, no single point of failure.
Programmable TTLs: Developers can define data lifecycles (seconds, hours, or months) optimizing both cost and performance for dynamic workloads like rollups, DePIN and AI inference caching.
Liveliness Layer: A high-throughput BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant) network continuously verifies data availability, ensuring that what’s stored remains accessible and provably live.
Cryptographic Discovery: Unlike AWS’s DNS-based routing, Hyve resolves content through cryptographic hashes and DHTs (Distributed Hash Tables), immune to DNS outages or centralized control.
Keeping the Spirit of Crypto Alive
Hyve not only offers web3 an alternative to AWS S3, it does it in a way that closely aligns with the values of decentralization:
The result is a robust, developer friendly, performant infrastructure that doesn’t sacrifice the core values of crypto in doing so.
Nobody Puts Data in the Corner
The AWS outage on October 20 was a wake-up call. We are more centralized than we realized and with that comes inherent risk and censorship. Hyve is taking a stand, removing some of the final roadblocks to the promised land of true decentralization. Crypto relied on AWS S3 because there wasn’t an alternative. Well Hyve is here and real-time decentralized hot data is coming with it.
Disclaimer:
This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, business, investment, financial, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers regarding those matters.
References to any protocols, projects, or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent any recommendation or offer to buy, sell, or participate in any activity involving digital assets or financial products. This material should not be relied upon as the basis for any investment or network participation decision.
Hyve and its contributors make no representations or warranties, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the information provided. Digital assets and decentralized networks operate within evolving legal and regulatory environments; such risks are not addressed in this content.
All views and opinions expressed are those of the authors as of the date of publication and are subject to change without notice.
