Daniel Walker
A large-scale outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday triggered service disruptions across the cryptocurrency industry, affecting the front-end operations of leading exchanges, explorers, DeFi protocols, and analytics platforms. Cloudflareโs infrastructure plays a critical role in powering security, traffic routing, and edge computing for millions of websites worldwide.
Major trading platforms such as Coinbase and Kraken were among those impacted, while popular tools like Etherscan, Aave, and DeFiLlama displayed recurring Cloudflare โ500 Internal Server Errorโ messages. The outage also extended beyond Web3, hitting major Web2 platforms, including Elon Muskโs X.
Cloudflare confirmed the issue around 11:48 a.m. UTC on its system status page, describing it as an internal service degradation affecting portions of its global network. The company later announced it had located the cause and begun rolling out a fix to restore normal functionality.
Although the outage occurred during scheduled maintenance at several Cloudflare data centers, the firm has not yet clarified whether the events are related or disclosed additional information about the root cause.
According to the latest update, Cloudflare stated:
โServices are beginning to recover, but some users may still see elevated error rates as remediation continues.โ
Following the incident, Cloudflare stock fell 3.5% in pre-market trading.
Crypto Sector Has Faced Similar Outages Before
This disruption is not unfamiliar territory for the digital asset space. A major Cloudflare outage in June 2022 crippled multiple crypto exchanges, echoing a similar incident in July 2019 that affected platforms such as Coinbase and CoinMarketCap.
Other cloud providers have also contributed to recent tech instability. Failures at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have previously caused various crypto dashboards and wallets to malfunction. In October, Coinbaseโs Base app temporarily displayed zero balances due to an AWS outage, affecting MetaMask and other services as well.
Additionally, a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last year caused millions of Windows systems worldwide to crashโyet, as industry experts repeatedly note, these events generally impact only the front-end interfaces, not the underlying blockchain networks.
Experts Warn Against Overreliance on Single Infrastructure Providers
Industry leaders stress that the recurring outages reveal a deeper vulnerability: heavy dependence on a small group of centralized service providers.
David Schwed, COO of SovereignAI, told PRIME:
โWith Cloudflare down today and AWS just weeks ago, itโs clear that resilience canโt be outsourced to a single vendor. If your operations require 24/7 uptime, your infrastructure must be built with the expectation that outages will occur.โ
He added that relying solely on vendors to restore service amounts to โpure negligenceโ in business continuity planning.
