Why did MetaMask show $0 on Ethereum when AWS went offline?
An AWS outage on October 20 caused MetaMask to display zero balances and delayed Base network transactions due to reliance on Infura's RPC services.Summary
An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in the US-EAST-1 region on October 20 disrupted services, causing MetaMask wallets to display $0 balances and slowing operations on the Base network. This incident highlighted the dependency of decentralized applications on centralized cloud infrastructure, as MetaMask defaults to using Infura's RPC endpoints for read/write operations. When Infura's cloud infrastructure faltered, it led to UI failures and misreporting of balances, even though the underlying funds remained secure on-chain and consensus mechanisms continued functioning. While short outages typically cause minor dips in DEX volume and transactions, this event underscores that reliance on single cloud providers creates systemic weaknesses. Experts suggest this will accelerate plans for multi-cloud failover, increased RPC endpoint diversity, and potentially prompt wallets to allow users to configure custom RPCs rather than relying solely on default providers like Infura.
(Source：CryptoSlate)