On October 20, 2025, a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted internet access and operations for thousands of businesses worldwide.
The incident began early Monday morning and took most of the day to resolve, with Amazon confirming that all services had “returned to normal operations” by 3:01 p.m. PT.
The disruption, traced to Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issues in AWS’s US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, temporarily brought down many of the internet’s largest platforms and applications.
Analysts have estimated that the financial impact could reach into the billions. The event once again underscored a fundamental weakness in the digital economy: when a single provider governs so much of the internet’s infrastructure, a localized failure becomes a global incident.
Centralized cloud infrastructure has long been considered reliable. Yet centralized cloud reliability is statistical, an uptime promise based on averages, whereas decentralized permanence is structural, ensured by design. Even the largest centralized providers can suffer configuration errors, routing failures, or cascading internal dependencies that compromise critical services.
When a single provider controls global data storage, routing, and replication, data sovereignty and verifiability depend on operational continuity rather than mathematical proof.
The AWS outage exposed how fragile that model is, showing how concentrated trust can amplify failure across systems.
As AI systems, IoT networks, and autonomous agents become deeply embedded in society, these risks scale exponentially. A failure in centralized infrastructure doesn’t just interrupt workflows; it halts the continuity of machine learning pipelines, sensor data aggregation, and autonomous decision-making.
Autonomys approaches the problem from first principles.
Built on a novel Proof-of-Archival-Storage (PoAS) consensus mechanism, the Autonomys Network ensures that every byte of data is cryptographically verifiable and permanently replicated across a global network of independent nodes known as farmers.
Rather than renting ephemeral storage from a single cloud provider, users and applications can store data directly on-chain, where it inherits the same permanence, security, and decentralization guarantees as the network itself.
Through Auto Drive — the user-friendly gateway to Autonomys’ Distributed Storage Network (DSN) — developers gain access to:
This architecture creates a data infrastructure designed not just to perform but to endure, resilient to outages, independent of intermediaries, and verifiable by anyone.
Operational resilience is only part of the story. The coming decade will bring the rise of quantum computing capable of breaking today’s encryption standards, eroding traditional guarantees of data security and making the permanence and verifiability of information more critical than ever.
As discussed in research conducted by Autonomys’ Research Team, led by Head of Research Chen Feng, and drawing on analysis from McKinsey Digital (2022), “Sectors need to ready themselves for post-quantum cryptography based on the longevity of data and the lifespan of systems. Data with extended shelf lives, such as corporate trade secrets, personal health records, or classified government documents, will remain valuable even after the advent of quantum computers. If such data, transferred over public networks today, remain relevant for a long time, they may face the threat of being intercepted and decrypted by future quantum computers. For instance, life insurance plans with extended terms or 30-year home mortgage loan agreements could potentially be susceptible to quantum-related risks as they will still be in effect when quantum computers become commercially accessible.”
