Amazon runs one of the world’s most popular content distribution networks (CDN) – Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, when a section of this network has issues or downtime, thousands of websites load incredibly slow or fail to work at all.
Unfortunately, for crypto traders in South Korea, AWS had a fault in the region and this left crypto traders unable to use a number of exchanges. Upbit was one of the affected crypto exchanges, and its users weren’t able to interact with the exchange whatsoever during the outage.
Upbit Facing Choppy Waters
Back in May, Upbit’s headquarters were raided after allegations that the crypto exchange was insolvent became public. Hardware was taken away by inspectors covering the case, following reports that the exchange wasn’t holding enough money in its accounts to cover all of the investor’s deposits. After a lengthy investigation, Upbit was cleared as solvent and was set on its way once more. This incident taking down the exchanges ability to operate is just another bump in the road for the exchange, but it could prove one bump too many for crypto traders.
Cloudflare Entering Decentralized Markets
Cloudflare is one of the biggest competitors that AWS has. Yet, Cloudflare is still a long way behind in terms of network size and number of users. Despite this, Cloudflare has launched its own decentralized content distribution network in a bid to stamp out centralization.
If Upbit was using both CDNs, there is a good chance this whole outage would never have occurred. Decentralized CDNs are becoming more popular as the content is hosted by everyone with an internet connection rather than on the firm’s servers – meaning it covers for server failure and provides more uptime for websites.
Finally Back up and Running
Upbit is currently the 21st largest crypto exchange by 24-hour trade volume according to data from Coin Market Cap, but the outage has taken its toll on the exchange’s rankings. During the 24 hours prior to the outage, Upbit was 17th largest with a 24-hour trade volume of $186 million. The outage has significantly decreased its 24-hour volume to $135 million. Fortunately for the exchange, the issue with AWS have been resolved and the platform is now back online and traders can resume trading.
Sites all around the globe rely on CDNs like AWS or Cloudflare, and when these services suffer inevitable outages, businesses lose millions in revenue. Fortunately, the outage only lasted a couple of hours, but the damage has definitely hurt Upbit. Hopefully, it will use two CDNs in the future as backup and spare itself from such incidents happening again.
