The latest Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 has sparked discussion about 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, which is dominated by a few centralized cloud providers. AWS has 30% of the global cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure with 21% and Google Cloud with 12%, giving the three more than 60% of the total cloud share, according to Statista.
“The vast majority of the data that makes up the websites we use every day resides in data warehouses owned by just three companies. We have repeatedly seen these companies suffer blackouts and large parts of the internet go down for hours,” said Marta Belcher, president and chairman of the Filecoin Foundation, in a commentary shared with The Defiant. “This latest AWS outage is just one example of the problem with 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, Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann told The Defiant.
“Every time AWS goes down, the entire technology industry is reminded, and not alone [decentralized finance]“The irony is that many ‘decentralized’ projects still rely on centralized cloud infrastructure, and even projects that don’t still run 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 through a network of independent providers.
This approach reduces dependence on a single company or server, allowing websites and applications to remain online even if some nodes go down, Belcher explains.
“Filecoin is all about creating a robust, decentralized alternative for the next generation of the internet, so we don’t have to rely on just one company,” she told The Defiant. “That includes Web3 projects – when Web3 projects experience blackouts due to 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 such as Titan and FilCDN to improve speed and reliability, according to a recent report from Messari commissioned by the Filecoin Foundation.
Akash
Another alternative that experts point to is Akash, a decentralized cloud platform that allows developers to 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 top options developers are actually deploying today,” Storj CTO Jacob Willoughby told The Defiant.
Willoughby explained that the benefits of using such platforms include reduced single-cloud risk, improved censorship resistance, data sustainability, and lower vendor dependency. He added that a practical approach for many companies 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 moving data-intensive processes to decentralized networks, he said. This allows resources to automatically scale based on demand and reduces the chance that a single provider can cause downtime.
“This will require companies that are willing to focus on the long term and prioritize efforts to build this and test it against these failures,” he said. “The long-term alternative is that we do our best to get an answer to the question ‘what are we going to do when the crisis breaks down?’”
The interaction
But as companies look beyond traditional cloud providers, they face a trade-off. Centralized clouds are easy to use, but a single outage can cause major 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 really matters,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, James Barnes, CEO and founder of StatusCake, offered a different perspective. As an infrastructure monitoring service, his team sees first-hand how cloud providers like AWS experience problems, with incidents sometimes increasing dramatically within seconds.
Barnes noted that while there is increasing interest in “decentralizing the cloud,” the Internet is already a distributed system with built-in redundancy and global routing. Major providers also provide large organizations with predictability and confidence in security.
“Given that the internet is already decentralized, replacing it with crypto nodes does not inherently make things more resilient,” he said. “In fact, it would almost certainly introduce volatility, inconsistent performance and a real lack of clear accountability if something goes wrong.”
Instead, he suggested viewing decentralized solutions as a backup tool for redundancy, rather than as a complete 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 maturity of critical internet infrastructure.
For any serious business today, a complete migration to a purely decentralized model would be irresponsible,” he said. “The real strategy is intelligent diversification.”
Ellidason explained that platforms need to unbundle the cloud and leverage the strengths of new infrastructure layers where it makes the most sense.
“For workloads where resiliency and extreme cost-efficiency are paramount, such as archive storage, content delivery networks and certain stateless computing tasks, DePIN offers a virtually unbeatable value proposition,” he explains. “So it’s about breaking it down and making sure you’re not stuck in a system that doesn’t work for you.”
He praised projects like Filecoin for its decentralized storage and Render for reshaping the GPU rendering economy. “They prove that the model works on a large scale, something we have learned a lot from,” Ellidason said. “So the starting point is not to abandon hyperscalers. It’s about expanding them, reducing dependency on them, and building a more complete, resilient, and economically efficient Internet through distributed systems.”