China’s cyber attack claims, AWS outage shakes the internet – Cross-platform Coinbase takes a hit

It’s been a chaotic start to the week for the global internet, and cryptocurrencies were not spared. Within hours, China accused the United States of launching a massive cyberattack that hit Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud provider, with a massive outage that took down hundreds of popular apps, including Coinbase, Venmo, and Robinhood.

The timing of the two events has generated a lot of buzz online. Although there is no confirmed connection, the spate of disruptions has once again exposed how dependent even the cryptocurrency industry is on centralized web infrastructure.

China criticizes the US

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) claimed on Sunday that it had “obtained irrefutable evidence” that the US National Security Agency (NSA) hacked the National Timekeeping Center, a key government facility that synchronizes Beijing time across the country’s financial, defense and transportation sectors.

According to MSS, the US launched a covert operation in March 2022, using 42 different cyber tools to penetrate systems and steal national data. The agency accused the US government of “aggressively pursuing cyber supremacy” and “trampling on international norms.”

China said the attack may have disrupted power, communications and financial operations.

AWS outage brings down half of the internet

Just one day later, early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage primarily in the North Virginia (US-EAST-1) region. The issue affected core services such as DynamoDB and EC2 that thousands of businesses rely on for compute and data storage.

As a result, apps and websites across every industry went offline, from Snapchat and Roblox to Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. Even Amazon’s own services like Alexa, Ring, and Prime Video were affected.

AWS confirmed an “increased error rate” and said its engineers are working to restore service. By late morning, some platforms began to show signs of recovery.

Coinbase makes sure all funds are safe

Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange running on AWS, was one of the hardest hit. Users faced login issues and transaction delays until the company confirmed that “all funds were safe.” Coinbase has since announced that the system has stabilized and the service is coming back online.

The brief outage reminded traders of how tied the crypto ecosystem remains to centralized systems.

Also read: Coinpedia Digest: This week’s crypto news highlights | October 18, 2025

A wake-up call to the digital world?

Two consecutive incidents, an accusation of cyberattack and a massive cloud outage, have proven that the internet, and by extension cryptocurrencies, are not as resilient as we would like to believe.

For now, AWS is recovering and Coinbase is back online, but both governments are silent.