Technical snags on the servers of the world’s leading cloud service provider forced two major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges to go offline.
AWS Services Impacted
Thursday morning, two leading South Korean crypto exchanges – Upbit and Coinone – were forced to go offline due to technical failures on critical servers of Amazon Web services (AWS). According to The Next Web, the outage affected services across the nation.
AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon, is one of the leading global cloud service providers. The firm provides services to individuals, businesses, and governments on a paid subscription basis. Live Bitcoin News had previously reported about the company launching its blockchain-as-a-service-offering.
The technical issue was identified as an internal server failure. Apart from the two cryptocurrency exchanges, several other e-commerce businesses were also impacted.
Amazon in its official communication stated:
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.
That networks in Seoul were severely impacted was confirmed by AWS.
Response by the Exchanges
Upbit is reported to have issued several statements following the outage and apologized for being unable to warn customers in advance.
Coinone announced that the platform would be under maintenance.
To ensure that users don’t suffer losses, Upbit announced that it would be canceling many trades under certain conditions.
Both the exchanges are now up and have resumed services.
Outage Highlights Dependency
The incident highlights the reliance of cryptocurrency businesses on centralized service providers like AWS.
While in this incident only exchanges were impacted, it is speculated that some of the popular blockchains are hosted using cloud computing services.
It is ironic that the technology that promotes decentralization is dependent on centralized servers that are owned by firms like AWS.
Independent investigators had earlier claimed that almost half of the nodes on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain were being hosted by Alibaba, a firm that competed with AWS. The reports, however, could not be confirmed.
The incident does, however, make it evident that blockchains that are supposed to promote the philosophy of decentralization have a long way to go before that goal can be realized.
Do you think the creation of true decentralized blockchains and services based on them are possible? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock