At 7:40 a.m. on March 23, 2021, the world’s most expensive traffic jam began with a bad left turn.

A container ship named Ever Given swanned into the Suez Canal sideways, jammed its bow in one bank, its stern in the other, and effectively unplugged the planet.

Now, here’s the thing… 

To call Ever Given a “ship” is like calling Godzilla a lizard.

It’s basically a floating skyscraper.

Picture four football fields of steel, 200,000 tons of floating capitalism, hauling 18,300 boxes of expectations—sneakers, semiconductors, breakfast cereal—all the tiny moving parts that make the global economy hum.

And every day the canal was blocked by this behemoth, hundreds of ships piled up on both sides. An estimated $9 billion in goods went nowhere.

Somewhere, an auto plant in Germany ran out of parts. Somewhere else, a man in Wisconsin didn’t get his inflatable hot tub. Somewhere else, the Wisconsin man’s wife was sitting in an inflatable hot tub at another man’s house.

From Düsediekerbäke to Pigeon Falls, it was a disaster.

But then something else happened that isn’t as widely known or reported.

And it has everything to do with the recent AWS outage (and, yes, how we’re looking to invest in the aftermath).

The Industrial Reformation

The big realization with the Ever Given: the world’s “efficient” systems were, in fact, never given at all.

They were brittle.

One stuck ship revealed our global economy, just like the Ever Given, was over-optimized, under-resilient, and one gust of chaos away from sideways.

But then some magic happened.

In the months that followed, “real-time logistics” went from jargon to ‘Damnit, Jerry, I want a dashboard, not a spreadsheet!’

• Real-time logistics companies like project44, Flexport, and FourKites surged in demand.
• Ports began installing AI-driven cranes, automated scheduling, and digital twins of container yards.
  
  
• And “supply chain visibility” became the sexiest phrase in boardrooms.

It birthed an entire class of real-time risk dashboards, autonomous port operations, and machine-learning-assisted routing systems that now form the backbone of global trade.

All because one ship sneezed in the wrong direction.

The Internet’s “Ever Given” Moment

The October 2025 AWS outage was the Internet’s own Ever Given moment—one bad configuration in US-East-1 froze a third of the modern web for roughly 15 hours, affecting hundreds of apps and over 11 million users.

A single regional choke point became a global traffic jam.

Thankfully, it didn’t last six days. But it lasted long enough to make the world realize just how much of the Internet balances on a few fragile pins: one cloud region, one DNS lookup, one database endpoint.

And if Ever Given showed how industrial systems choke on chaos…

The AWS outage showed how decentralized ones don’t.

Bitcoin produced blocks as normally.

The Ethereum chain didn’t even hiccup.

Chainlink publicly announced its oracle services—which power 70% of DeFi—were “fully operational” throughout the AWS event.

Tom Lee, to his credit, has hammered this point all year: uptime is the most important metric. He argues that institutional investors don’t care first about speed or flashy features. They care about systems that never go down.

“Ethereum,” he said, “has had zero downtime… that’s what matters… Wall Street has already decided Ethereum is the chain they’re going to build on.”

To be sure, the outage also exposed centralized dependencies in the crypto stack (e.g., cloud-hosts, RPC endpoints, etc.). But much like the recent flash crash of October 10, it separated the networks built for hype from the ones built for hurricanes.

Every Great Failure is an Opportunity

Every industrial shift begins with a failure.

The 1873 “Long Depression” birthed corporate accounting and standardized balance sheets.

The Titanic’s sinking birthed the International Ice Patrol and modern maritime radio law.

The FTX collapse—crypto’s version of the Titanic—birthed proof-of-reserves and a self-custody renaissance.

And the AWS outage of 2025? It may yet accelerate the decentralized infrastructure era.

Of course, this won’t be the last major outage before this new era takes the wheel. It’s likely just the first in a series. But each one will feed demand for the kind of infrastructure that learns from failure, hardens under pressure, and refuses to go dark.

There’s one sector in crypto—called Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN)—that’s built for exactly this kind of disruption.

We’ve been tracking it for years, and though prices have been beaten down, we believe it’s positioned to lead a new kind of infrastructure cycle—where uptime, not speculation, drives value.

The good news for DePIN? Chaos is an excellent marketing campaign.

Every centralized failure is another billboard for a world run on thousands of little clouds instead of one big nervous one.

More on what we’ve uncovered tomorrow.