Cloudflare experienced a major outage that amounted to widespread service disruptions across thousands of websites and applications on Tuesday.
Several large centralized crypto services rely on Cloudflare to help with heavy traffic. BitMEX faced an error, while there was also significant downtime for Telegram-linked blockchain Toncoin. But the fallout spread beyond crypto, where platforms like X or ChatGPT also went down, thus affecting millions of people.
This episode comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) had an outage that removed access to major blockchains like Coinbase’s Base chain as well as Infura, which runs a lot of blockchains.
Tuesday’s outage reignited the conversation about the need to decentralize the infrastructure to keep the Internet running.
“Today’s Cloudflare outage shows how vulnerable the digital economy has become. When a single upstream provider experiences problems, the impact doesn’t remain contained; it ripples across industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and backend payment services,” said Fadl Mantash, Chief Information Security Officer at Tribe payments, in an email to CoinDesk.
“Payments are particularly vulnerable. The infrastructure behind a single transaction relies on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools and card schemes. When any link in that chain fails, the entire journey can break,” Mantash added.
Some in the crypto world have called for DePIN to become more widely used to combat such problems. DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, uses blockchain incentives to coordinate and reward people for building and maintaining real-world infrastructure. This can be anything from wireless networks, to sensors, to energy systems, the purpose is not to rely on a central company. Thus, users contribute hardware or services and earn tokens in return, creating an open, community-driven infrastructure layer.
One of the executives pushing is the CEO of Gaimin, a DePIN project focused on cloud infrastructure distribution. Nökkvi Dan Ellidason said: “We need to move to a truly distributed cloud model. By leveraging existing globally dispersed resources like underutilized PCs, Gaimin is building a network where capacity is spread across regions and continents, making it difficult for a single failure to take down the entire global system.”
“This is the only way to secure the digital economy against the inevitable fragility of centralization,” added Dan Ellidason.
Read more: Cloudflare Global Outage Spreads to Crypto; More front ends down
