TL;DR
- Widespread Error 500: Multiple services, including block explorers and DeFi platforms, displayed internal server failures.
- Impact on the crypto ecosystem: Toncoin and Arbiscan suffered “major outages,” affecting user accessibility.
- Recurrence of issues: This incident closely follows a recent AWS outage that also affected major players like Coinbase.
On Tuesday, November 18, multiple internet services were affected by a global Cloudflare outage. The event caused numerous crypto platform interfaces to experience significant disruptions. The internet service provider, crucial to the infrastructure of much of the web, confirmed it is investigating an issue that generated “widespread 500 errors,” affecting both its customers and its own dashboard and API.
Major platforms within the decentralized finance ecosystem reported being affected by the global Cloudflare outage. Toncoin reported a “major outage,” while the Arbitrum block explorer, Arbiscan, was also compromised.
Other sites, such as the social media platform X and data aggregator DefiLlama, intermittently showed “internal server errors.” A 500 error is a generic signal that a web server is experiencing an internal problem, preventing users from accessing pages.
The Vulnerability of Centralized Infrastructure
This incident underscores the digital ecosystem’s dependency—including the crypto sector—on centralized infrastructure providers. The global Cloudflare outage comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a massive outage that affected thousands of websites and applications, including Coinbase’s trading platform and its Layer 2 network, Base, as well as the popular platform Robinhood.
For its part, crypto exchange BitMEX confirmed it was investigating an outage related to the Cloudflare issues. It is worth noting that while these failures affect the user-visible interface (the front end), the underlying blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts generally remain operational, meaning user funds are not at risk of being accessed or lost directly due to these types of events.
The repercussion of the global Cloudflare outage was not limited to users and platforms. Cloudflare Inc (NET) shares registered a 3.5% drop in pre-market trading following the news of the incident, reflecting investor concern regarding the reliability of its services on a global scale. This event highlights the importance of redundancy and decentralization to ensure resilience in the digital age.
