- Morpho’s web app and API were knocked offline for about three hours on July 16 by an Amazon CloudFront outage.
- Protocol’s engineers confirmed all services are back, though performance may still be degraded.
- The failure affected Morpho users and a range of other sites, including Hugging Face and the UK’s National Lottery.
Morpho has confirmed that its web app and API came back online following a partial outage that it blamed on an Amazon CloudFront failure.
The Amazon downtime took out the second-largest onchain lending network, behind only Aave, for several hours, during which borrowers and lenders could not reach the app.morpho.org and api.morpho.org portals.
Morpho is back online
Julien Thomas, a principal engineer at Morpho, confirmed that the lending protocol was back online after initially reporting on the AWS CloudFront that caused the downtime in the first place.
Julien wrote: “All Morpho services are back and stable. Performance may still be impacted but the app & the api are functioning.”
Amazon Web Services also reported the problem on its status page around the time Morpho experienced its downtime. The cloud service provider noted that between 12:45 AM and 4:18 AM PDT, CloudFront customers using VPC Origins experienced 5xx errors.
AWS engineers explained that the system that pushes routing configuration to AWS network processors stopped loading the updated data correctly once the fleet that handles connections to private VPC origins reached its internal capacity limit.
CloudFront is Amazon’s content delivery network, the layer that routes web traffic to a site’s servers. VPC Origins, the feature at the center of the failure, is a newer option that lets customers serve applications from behind private load balancers without exposing back-end infrastructure to the open internet.
The company said the issue has been resolved now.
Who was affected by the AWS downtime?
As Amazon reported, the 5xx errors downtime affected CloudFront customers using VPC Origins. The AI platform Hugging Face, the UK’s National Lottery, and players of Bethesda’s Fallout 76 could also not get online, just as Morpho users.
The tradesea trading platform said it had to ship a workaround to keep its web platform online, containing the downtime to its mobile app.
The downtime is the latest to have knocked down the services of a crypto platform. As recently as May, Coinbase went dark after “a room overheating in an AWS datacenter when multiple chillers failed.”
What was and wasn’t affected
The outage struck Morpho’s hosted interface, not its onchain contracts, and the distinction matters. Morpho is an onchain lending network that connects lenders and borrowers, and it reported more than $11 billion in deposits when it raised $175 million in June, in a round co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit. DeFiLlama currently lists Morpho’s total value locked at about $7.33 billion, spread mainly across Ethereum and Base.
Neither Morpho nor AWS has published a full incident report tying specific user impact to the CloudFront failure. Julien noted that performance could stay degraded even after services returned, so users may want to watch for a formal post-mortem and confirm transactions settle as expected before assuming full recovery.
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FAQs
What caused the Morpho outage on July 16?
Morpho engineer Julien attributed the outage of app.morpho.org and api.morpho.org to an Amazon CloudFront issue, which AWS said stemmed from an internal capacity limit affecting CloudFront customers using VPC Origins.
Is Morpho back online now?
Yes. Julien said on X that all Morpho services are back and stable, though he cautioned that performance may still be impacted even with the app and API functioning.
What other services did the AWS CloudFront outage affect?
The same CloudFront failure took down services including the AI platform Hugging Face, the UK's National Lottery website and app, and Bethesda's game Fallout 76.
Disclaimer. The information provided is not trading advice. Cryptopolitan.com holds no liability for any investments made based on the information provided on this page. We strongly recommend independent research and/or consultation with a qualified professional before making any investment decisions.
Hannah Collymore
Hannah is a writer and editor with nearly a decade of blog writing and event reporting experience in the crypto space. At Cryptopolitan, Hannah contributes to the news page, reporting and analyzing the latest developments in DeFi, RWA, crypto regulation, AI and frontier tech industries. She graduated from Arcadia university with a degree in Business Administration.
