Internet

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) latest outage on Oct. 20 has sparked debate over decentralized alternatives and hybrid strategies for resilience.

The outage lasted several hours and disrupted major websites and apps, including Robinhood. Experts say it highlights the fragility of today’s internet, where a few centralized cloud providers dominate. AWS holds 30% of the global cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure at 21% and Google Cloud at 12%, giving the three more than 60% of total cloud share, per Statista.

“The vast majority of data making up the websites we use every day sits in data warehouses owned by just three companies. We have repeatedly seen these companies suffer blackouts, and vast swaths of the web go down for hours,” Marta Belcher, President and Chair at the Filecoin Foundation, said in comments shared with The Defiant. “This latest AWS outage is just another example of the problem with having single points of failure.”

This incident has renewed interest in alternatives to centralized infrastructure, including blockchain-based and decentralized networks such as Filecoin and Akash, Kadan Stadelmann, CTO of Komodo, told The Defiant.

“Every time AWS goes down, it reminds the entire tech industry, not just [decentralized finance], that the internet still runs on single points of failure,” he said. “The irony is that many ‘decentralized’ projects still rely on centralized cloud infrastructure, and even those that don’t still operate on ISPs or some form of centralized tech infrastructure. That’s the weakest link.”

Filecoin

Filecoin, a decentralized storage network with a total value locked (TVL) of $21 million, uses cryptographic proofs to ensure data is securely stored and continuously accessible across a network of independent providers.

This approach reduces reliance on any single company or server, allowing websites and applications to remain online even if some nodes fail, Belcher explained.

“Filecoin is all about creating a robust, decentralized alternative for the next generation of the web so that we’re not dependent on just one company,” she told The Defiant. “That includes Web3 projects — when Web3 projects have blackouts as a result of an AWS outage, it underscores the need for those projects to use decentralized storage as well.”

The network includes tools such as Akave, Storacha, and Basin for integration, and retrieval networks like Titan and FilCDN to improve speed and reliability, according to a recent report by Messari that was commissioned by the Filecoin Foundation.

Akash

Another alternative experts pointed to is Akash, a decentralized cloud platform that lets developers rent computing resources from a distributed network instead of relying on centralized providers. It uses blockchain-based smart contracts to manage allocation, payments, and verification.

“For compute, Akash (decentralized GPU/CPU marketplace), Valdi, and Flux (decentralized app/compute fabric) are the leading options developers actually deploy on today,” Storj CTO Jacob Willoughby told The Defiant.

Willoughby explained that the pros of using such platforms consist of reduced single-cloud risk, improved censorship resistance, data durability, and lower vendor lock-in. He added that a practical approach for many businesses is a hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

Using tools like Kubernetes or other compute coordination systems, companies can run core workloads on AWS or GCP while shifting data-intensive processes to decentralized networks, he said. This allows resources to automatically scale based on demand and reduces the chance that any single provider can cause downtime.

“This needs businesses willing to focus on the long term and prioritize the effort to put this in place and test it against those failures,” he said. “The long-term alternative is putting in the work to have an answer to ‘what are we going to do if it is down?’”

The Trade-Off

Still, as companies look beyond traditional cloud providers, they face a trade-off. Centralized clouds are easy to use, but a single outage can cause big problems. Decentralized systems are harder to manage, but they can keep things running even when parts fail, Stadelmann said.

He explained that the trade-off is complex: “After every AWS outage, more teams realize which one actually matters,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, James Barnes, CEO and founder of StatusCake, offered a different perspective. As an infrastructure monitoring service, his team sees firsthand how cloud providers like AWS experience issues, with incident events sometimes spiking dramatically in seconds.

Barnes noted that while there’s growing interest in “decentralizing the cloud,” the internet is already a distributed system with built-in redundancy and global routing. Major providers also offer large organizations predictability and confidence in security.

“Given that the internet is already decentralized, replacing it with crypto nodes doesn’t inherently make things more resilient,” he said. “In fact, it would almost certainly introduce volatility, inconsistent performance, and a real lack of clear accountability when something goes wrong.”

Instead, he suggested viewing decentralized solutions as a backup tool for redundancy, rather than a full replacement for traditional cloud infrastructure.

“Intelligent Diversification”

Nokkvi Dan Ellidason, CEO of GAIMIN, offered a third perspective, highlighting how distributed systems can be used strategically.

“This isn’t about replacement; it’s about the maturation of critical internet infrastructure.

For any serious enterprise, a full-scale migration to a purely decentralized model today would be irresponsible,” he said. “The real strategy is intelligent diversification.”

Ellidason explained that platforms should unbundle the cloud and leverage the strengths of new infrastructure layers where it makes the most sense.

“For workloads where resilience and extreme cost-efficiency are paramount, like archival storage, content delivery networks, and certain stateless compute tasks, DePIN offers an almost unbeatable value proposition,” he explained. “So it’s about breaking it down into pieces and making sure you’re not locked into a system that doesn’t work for you.”

He praised projects like Filecoin for decentralized storage and Render for reshaping GPU rendering economics. “They are proving the model works at scale, and something we’ve learned quite a lot from,” Ellidason said. “So, the takeaway isn’t to abandon hyperscalers. It’s to augment them, to de-risk your dependency on them, and to build a more complete, resilient, and economically efficient internet through distributed systems.”