Why Did MetaMask Show $0 on Ethereum when AWS Went Offline?

Why It Matters

For crypto firms and users, the event underscores operational and reputational risk from single-vendor cloud dependencies and increases pressure to build multi-cloud or on-chain resiliency to prevent future service disruptions.

Summary

An Amazon Web Services outage in the US-EAST-1 region on Oct. 20 — beginning about 03:11 ET and involving DNS and EC2 load-balancer health-monitoring failures — temporarily caused MetaMask and other Ethereum wallet interfaces to display $0 balances and slowed operations on the Base network. The incident highlighted that many so-called decentralized services still depend on centralized cloud infrastructure for node access, DNS resolution and API routing. For crypto firms and users, the event underscores operational and reputational risk from single-vendor cloud dependencies and increases pressure to build multi-cloud or on-chain resiliency to prevent future service disruptions.