If Web3 is decentralized, why do DeFi dApps still break when the cloud goes down?

A recent outage in Amazon's US-EAST-1 region demonstrated that while blockchains themselves remain functional, the surrounding infrastructure—including RPC gateways (Infura, Alchemy), DNS, indexers (The Graph), and key-management systems—is heavily centralized on major cloud providers like AWS. This dependency creates single points of failure, causing user-facing applications (dApps) to degrade or halt even when the underlying blockchain consensus is unaffected. The illusion of redundancy breaks down when multiple providers rely on the same cloud region, leading to correlated failures. Solutions are emerging, such as using provider-quorum RPCs, implementing light-client verification in wallets, adopting multi-CDN setups, and developing decentralized sequencers (like those from Espresso or Astria). Regulatory pressures, such as the EU's DORA, are also forcing regulated financial entities in crypto to diversify cloud dependencies, pushing the industry toward operational resilience that better aligns with decentralization ideals.

(Source：CryptoSlate)