When a single Domain Name System (DNS) record failed, it triggered a catastrophic chain reaction across Amazon Web Services (AWS). Within just two hours, over 14,000 websites went dark, erasing more than $1 billion in value. Major platforms like Coinbase, MetaMask, and Robinhood were among the casualties, and even after services came back online, data synchronization issues caused a second wave of disruptions. The event served as a stark reminder of how fragile our digital world has become when so much of it depends on a single provider.

Amazon attempted to safeguard its infrastructure with multiple localized points of failure, but it couldn’t account for a regional DNS disruption. As the cloud provider for over 90% of Fortune 100 companies, the outage proved that even the largest centralized giants can’t eliminate the inherent risks of their own structure. It exposed what happens when we place immense trust in essential infrastructure that lacks the right safeguards.

The False Comfort of Scale

The outage wasn’t just a technical error; it exposed a fundamental flaw in the architecture of the modern internet. A handful of providers now control the backbone of our digital lives. Three “hyperscalers”—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—command nearly 70% of the global cloud market. When one of them stumbles, the effects cascade far beyond its own network. Our systems are designed for constant uptime, streamlined for efficiency but brittle enough to shatter when one part of the assembly line stops.

This dependency stretches well beyond private companies. Public institutions are building critical national infrastructure, including digital identity frameworks, payment systems, and artificial intelligence models, on the very same cloud platforms. When these fail, access to essential services can halt instantly. Centralization promises speed and lower costs, but its hidden price is fragility. When everything runs through the same chokepoint, a single security breach or configuration error can bring entire sectors to their knees.

Distributed Systems as a Foundation for Resilience

True resilience doesn’t come from adding more backup servers to a centralized system. It comes from removing the single point of control altogether, which is the core principle of decentralized design. In a decentralized network, independent nodes share the responsibility of verification and decision-making, ensuring the system can withstand failures in any single part.

This is made possible by technologies like verifiable credentials and blockchain-based trust registries. Instead of requiring all data to be stored and checked in one central database, these tools allow for cryptographic verification across a distributed network. This model allows information to remain in its respective organizational or departmental silo while verification is decoupled from a central authority. It eliminates the massive single point of failure without sacrificing security, all while keeping data where it belongs.

An Infrastructure Built to Fail Safely

Critical infrastructure doesn’t need to live inside a massive, centralized database that creates an ever-growing honeypot for fraudsters. We don’t need a single digital backbone to make essential systems work together. Interoperability can be achieved through open standards and distributed systems that coordinate data without concentrating control.

Web3 technologies already offer the tools to make this a reality, allowing sectors like finance, identity, and AI to operate securely across independent networks. An infrastructure designed this way automatically enforces boundaries on how data is shared, stored, and accessed. The goal isn’t to replace our entire digital framework overnight but rather to lessen the impact of its inevitable failures. By adopting distributed verification, we can build the next generation of digital infrastructure to be resilient by design, creating systems that can fail safely instead of catastrophically.