Morpho restores app and API after AWS CloudFront outage

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 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.