Your Cloud Is a Ticking Time Bomb: How to Survive a Quantum Explosion and Preserve AI Data Forever.

20 October 2025 a major failure in the operation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted access to The Intranet and the operations of thousands of businesses worldwide.

The incident began early Monday morning and lasted most of the day; by 3:01 PM Pacific Time, Amazon confirmed that all services “had returned to normal operation.”

An outage caused by issues with domain name resolution (DNS) in the AWS US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) temporarily disrupted many of the largest internet platforms and applications.

Analysts calculated that the financial consequences could amount to billions. This event once again highlighted the fundamental weakness of the digital economy: when one provider manages such a significant part of the Intranet infrastructure, a local failure becomes a global incident.

The fragility of centralization Centralized cloud infrastructure has long been considered reliable. However, the reliability of a centralized cloud is a statistical measure guaranteed by uptime, based on average figures, while decentralized stability is a structural measure provided by the project. Even the largest centralized providers can face configuration errors, routing failures, or cascading internal dependencies that jeopardize mission-critical services.

When one provider controls global data storage, routing, and replication, the sovereignty and verifiability of data depend on operational continuity rather than mathematical proof.

A failure in AWS operations revealed the fragility of this model and showed how concentrated trust can amplify system failures.

As artificial intelligence systems, Internet of Things networks, and autonomous agents become deeply embedded in society, these risks grow exponentially. A failure in centralized infrastructure not only disrupts workflows but also disrupts the continuity of machine learning pipelines, sensor data aggregation, and autonomous decision-making.

Decentralized permanence as an antidote Autonomys approaches solving this problem from the very first principles. The Autonomys network, built on the new Proof-of-Archival-Storage consensus mechanism (PoAS), guarantees cryptographic verification of every byte of data and its constant replication in a global network of independent nodes, called “farmers.”

Instead of renting temporary storage from a single cloud service provider, users and applications can store data directly on the chain, where they inherit the same guarantees of permanence, security, and decentralization as the network itself.

Thanks to Auto Drive — a convenient gateway to the distributed data storage network (DSN) Autonomys — developers gain access to:

The present permanence in the chain with cryptographic proofs of data integrity Automatic reservation through replication with erasure coding among geographically distributed farmers Dynamic market pricing based on guaranteed SSD capacity rather than centralized control Such architecture creates a data infrastructure designed not only to operate but also to be reliable, fault-tolerant, independent of intermediaries, and verifiable by any party.

Constancy beyond the quantum horizon Operational resilience is just part of the story. In the next decade, quantum computing will become a reality capable of surpassing current encryption standards, undermining traditional data security guarantees, and making the permanence and verifiability of information more important than ever.

As discussed in the study conducted by the Autonomys research group led by research head Chen Fen, and based on the analysis by McKinsey Digital (2022), “Sectors need to prepare for post-quantum cryptography, based on data longevity and system lifespan. Data with long-term storage, such as corporate trade secrets, personal medical records, or classified government documents, will retain their value even after the advent of quantum computers. If such data, transmitted today over public networks, remains relevant for a long time, it may face the threat of interception and decryption by future quantum computers. For example, life insurance plans with extended terms or 30-year mortgage agreements may potentially be subject to risks associated with quantum technologies, as they will still be in effect when quantum computers become commercially available.”

The danger is not in the future, but in the present. Data encrypted with modern algorithms can be collected today and decrypted later, when quantum technologies become more mature.

Although Autonomys does not yet implement post-quantum cryptography, its architecture provides a foundational structure for systems that can evolve towards post-quantum resilience.

Thanks to the immutable anchoring of data in the chain and its protection through transparent cryptographic proofs, Autonomys guarantees that as cryptographic methods evolve, the integrity of the stored information will remain provable, unaltered, and ready to transition to next-generation standards.

From fragility to continuity The AWS outage on October 20, 2025 illustrates an important truth: reliability must be internal rather than dependent. Systems designed for autonomy, verifiability, and stability are capable of withstanding both outages and the changing landscape of cryptography.

In an era where AI, data, and computations are becoming increasingly interdependent, Autonomys offers a model of decentralized continuity, in which every fragment of data, once saved, becomes a permanent part of a collectively maintained and cryptographically verified history.

From centralized fragility to decentralized resilience. This is how digital trust is maintained.

About Autonomys

The Autonomys network — the foundational layer for AI 3.0 — represents a hyper-scalable stack of decentralized AI infrastructure (deAI), including high-performance persistent distributed storage, data availability and access, as well as modular execution. Our deAI ecosystem provides all the necessary components for creating and deploying secure super-decentralized applications (dApps based on AI) and on-chain agents, giving them advanced AI capabilities for dynamic and autonomous operation.