Two prominent South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges went offline after Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers suffered a nationwide failure.
AWS, one of the world’s leading companies in cloud computing services, suffered from an hour-long network failure in South Korea. The event was responsible for the outage experienced by Coinone and Upbit crypto exchanges.
Many other online businesses also saw their operations stall. Coupang, the country’s biggest online service provider, Market Kurly, a food delivery service, Yanolja, a hotel booking service, and POOQ, an online media service company, all saw their websites go offline.
The problems were resolved within 90 minutes however:
“Between 3:19 PM and 4:43 PM PST we experienced increased error rates in the [Asian-Pacific region] (…) The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.”
Coinone and Upbit have since resumed all trading services. Both exchanges were quick to make announcements apologizing and informing users. In order to protect customer assets, Upbit cancelled several trade orders executed before the server went offline.
Minimal Impact
It seems that the outage had little impact on the crypto industry, as only crypto exchanges have reportedly been affected. However, many in the crypto industry speculate that a vast quantity of nodes from popular blockchains are being hosted by cloud computing services.
Back in July, independent researchers claimed that roughly half of the nodes powering the Bitcoin Cash blockchain were being hosted by Alibaba, a rival of AWS. Although the veracity of the claims remains unclear, the outage will for many perfectly illustrate the need for decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
