The outage affected major crypto platforms like Coinbase, Ledger, BitMEX, and Arbiscan. The incident also reignited concerns about the crypto industry’s reliance on centralized infrastructure, especially after a similar AWS outage last month. Additionally, Vitalik Buterin recently released his “Trustless Manifesto,” which warned that every centralized component — even small ones like hosted nodes — becomes a potential chokepoint.
Crypto Sites Hit Hard by Cloudflare Outage
Cloudflare confirmed that a fault in its bot detection system caused the major outage on Tuesday, which temporarily took down roughly 20% of webpages across the internet — including several major crypto platforms. In a post-mortem statement, the company explained that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System expanded beyond its normal limits, leading to software failure. Cloudflare initially suspected a large-scale DDoS attack but later clarified that no cyberattack or malicious activity occurred.
The disruption had a very wide impact due to Cloudflare’s central role in the internet ecosystem. The company manages around 20% of all internet traffic and supports about one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps, and online services.
Post-mortem statement released by Cloudflare
As a result, the outage briefly knocked major crypto sites like Coinbase, Blockchain.com, Ledger, BitMEX, Toncoin, Arbiscan, and DefiLlama offline, along with other platforms like X and ChatGPT. The incident also led to discussions about the crypto industry’s dependence on centralized infrastructure providers, especially after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services just last month.
Error message
EthStorage, a project focused on enabling Ethereum-based web hosting, said in an interview that events like the AWS and Cloudflare outages shed some light on the inherent weaknesses of centralized systems. They argued that decentralized web infrastructure is becoming more necessary to avoid these kinds of single points of failure.
The conversation around decentralization intensified even more last week when Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a “Trustless Manifesto.” In it, he urged developers to avoid sacrificing decentralization for convenience or faster adoption. Buterin, along with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, warned that the use of centralized components like hosted nodes or relayers introduces subtle but serious vulnerabilities. Each dependency, they argued, becomes another potential chokepoint — the very issue that was revealed by the recent Cloudflare outage.
