Amazon Web Services Outrage Causes Korean Exchanges to go Dark

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that affected two major cryptocurrency exchanges and dozens of other businesses. These server Failures ended up leaving Coinone and Upbit with its services offline, reported The Next Web on November 22, 2018. 

South Korean Exchanges Lose Connection

Two of the major South Korean digital currency exchanges went off for a few hours due to an outage on Amazon web hosting services. According to the report, the outage affected several sites in a nationwide failure this Thursday morning.

AWS is the most used hosting and web service by South Korean firms as the company offers unbeatable prices far too difficult for the competition to beat. Apart from major cryptocurrency companies, other South Korean largest conglomerates, Samsung and Hyundai, also use AWS services for their overseas operations, and many more companies in the country are also using the Amazon cloud services for local operations purposes.

Leader in Cloud Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world’s most used cloud services. The company had some technical issues and suffered an outage that affected several businesses across the South Korean country. Early in the morning, AWS announced:

“Between 3:19 PM and 4:43 PM PST we experienced increased error rates in the [Asian-Pacific region], the issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.”

These major internal server failures brought two of the most popular digital asset exchanges, Upbit and Coinone, to complete darkness. The outage also caused problems to a lot of the popular e-commerce hubs in the country who suddenly were unreachable for close to an hour, as reported by the News Agency.

As soon as Upbit and Coinone noticed the issue the immediately sent out warnings to their customers to avoid further complications. While Upbit promptly presented its apologies for the outage, Coinone announced it was going into maintenance mode.

Admins in both exchanges even went as far as to take extreme measures to prevent users from getting stiffed while the platform was offline. Upbit even stated that it could be canceling many of the paused trades under certain conditions.

Bitcoin Cash Community Voices Concerns

The event triggered concerns within the community as rumors saying that some of the most popular blockchains are hosted by cloud services such as AWS. A few months ago, independent researchers claimed that around half of the nodes serving the Bitcoin Cash network were being hosted by Alibaba, the main AWS competitor. Meanwhile, it’s once again come as a reminder about the dangers of industries completely relying on centralized services, and the problems that can arise from such dependency.