Decentralized lending network Morpho restored its web application and API on July 16 after a partial outage caused by a failure in Amazon Web Services' CloudFront service. The incident, blamed on a suspected AWS CloudFront disruption, left users unable to access app.morpho.org and api.morpho.org for several hours.
Morpho’s principal engineer, Julien Thomas, confirmed that all services were back online, though he warned that performance could remain degraded. “All Morpho services are back and stable. Performance may still be impacted but the app & the api are functioning,” he posted. AWS also acknowledged the problem on its status page, noting that between 12:45 AM and 4:18 AM PDT, CloudFront customers using VPC Origins encountered 5xx errors. Engineers said the system pushing routing configurations reached an internal capacity limit, stopping correct data loading.
The outage affected Morpho’s hosted interface only — not its on-chain smart contracts. Borrowers and lenders could not reach the frontend, but the underlying lending protocol continued to operate normally, and no user funds were at risk. With over $7.33 billion in total value locked, primarily on Ethereum and Base, Morpho is the second-largest on-chain lending network behind Aave. The protocol recently raised $175 million in a funding round co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit.
Other services that rely on AWS CloudFront were also hit, including the AI platform Hugging Face, the UK’s National Lottery, and Fallout 76 online services. The tradesea trading platform said it had to deploy a workaround to keep its web platform online. The incident underscores how decentralized finance platforms still depend on centralized cloud infrastructure for their frontends, even as blockchains and smart contracts remain unaffected.
