When Cloud Control Fails, the Internet Feels It; It’s Time for Decentralized RPC to Step In
The past six months have forced the industry to confront an uncomfortable truth: the cloud’s biggest weakness isn’t hardware or cybersecurity; it’s centralization. The internet’s most trusted infrastructure providers have become its most dangerous single points of failure. Multiple AWS and Cloudflare disruptions, triggered by configuration errors, spread beyond their origins, stalling platforms, crypto exchanges, and enterprise apps worldwide. None were attacks, just routine operational mistakes amplified by centralization.
As Yair Cleper, co-founder of Magma Devs and contributor to Lava Network, says, “Too much of the internet runs through too few chokepoints. When a major cloud region or global edge network falters, the blast radius stretches across various exchanges and apps.”
That dynamic explains why an AWS regional update or a Cloudflare routing issue can freeze wallet access, halt API endpoints, and disrupt crypto users’ ability to interact with otherwise healthy chains. The internet has collapsed into a narrow dependency graph, where various cloud control planes route, secure, and deliver most global traffic.
Why Do Small Internal Errors Go Global?
Cloud providers rarely disclose outage costs, but for mid-to-large enterprises, downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, even reaching millions per hour for revenue-critical systems. Those figures exclude cascading failures across authentication, payments, custody, and trading, where every second counts.
Crypto infrastructure is especially vulnerable. As seen during AWS’s October outage, Coinbase, Robinhood, and multiple wallets were affected not because blockchains failed, but because their access layer, RPC endpoints, APIs, and gateway services relied on the same cloud chokepoints.
“The lesson from both the AWS and Cloudflare incidents is simple,” Cleper states. “If all traffic shares one road, one pothole stops everyone.”
AI Will Strain Centralized Infrastructure
According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), global data center electricity consumption will double by 2030, with AI workloads accounting for a large share. More AI means continuous requests, greater reliance on cloud APIs, and increased pressure on routing and DNS layers.
Cleper explains, “Agents don’t sleep, and they need clean, verifiable data. Always-on agent traffic raises the cost of chokepoints. Spreading requests across independent providers, with health signals and audit trails, turns reliability into a property of the system, not a single vendor.”
The AI era will require infrastructure that can survive localized outages without global consequences.
Why Decentralized RPC Changes the Failure Profile
Platforms like Lava Network route requests across multiple independent providers, monitor performance in real time, and automatically reroute traffic off unhealthy paths. The result: failures that would normally become platform-wide outages look more like localized degradation.
As Cleper explains, “Requests are spread across multiple independent providers, and health checks move traffic away from any path that degrades. A provider issue stays local instead of taking down the whole application.”
In other words, decentralization isn’t redundancy; it’s fault isolation. If an application were using Lava Network during an AWS or Cloudflare disruption, it could route around the failure rather than going dark.
“The router’s job is to keep incidents small,” says Cleper. “If one region or provider falters, requests are steered to unaffected routes and restored when healthy. The blast radius shrinks from ‘entire app’ to ‘the slice using the bad path.’”
That’s the inverse of centralized RPC, where a single gateway failure affects every user.
Verifiable Diversity: The Missing Ingredient in Web3 Infrastructure
A key strength of decentralized RPCs is that they can deliver verifiable diversity, not just claims.
Cleper shares, “Diversity you can verify. You can require agreement across independent sources, export request-level logs and metrics, and prove that traffic actually used distinct providers.” That kind of verification is “harder to mimic in single-vendor setups.”
That audit trail matters in the moments that count, post-mortem scenarios, compliance reviews, and incident reporting, especially for exchanges, custodians, and financial institutions that need to show continuity during partial outages.
What Decentralized RPC Can and Cannot Fix
Decentralized RPC isn’t a cure-all, but it reduces the impact of single-provider outages and network failures by routing and cross-checking across providers. As Cleper says, it can’t “patch a broken blockchain.” It won’t prevent chain halts, consensus bugs, or smart-contract flaws, but it will make infrastructure failure less catastrophic.
The Future: Cloud + Decentralized Routing
Reflecting on the next phase of internet infrastructure, Cleper sees the destination as hybrid: cloud elasticity remains, but over-concentration will eventually fade. He explains, “The steady state is multiple clouds and specialist providers, stitched together by routing that prefers healthy paths and leaves an audit trail you can trust. Outages still happen; they just stop becoming headlines.”
If 2025 was a warning shot, 2026 is the year the industry must diversify its access layer before the next control-plane error brings half the internet to a halt.
